Steven Wright Blog

While automating the deployment for my SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) projects, as mentioned in a previous post: Automating SQL Server Database Projects Deployment , I found it important to create / maintain the projects refactor logs.  This is because SSDT / DAC framework uses the model driven deployment method, which works by comparing the model with the target database to create / execute a delta script for updating the database to match the model.  A problem with is method is miss identifying objects which have been renamed or transferred to a new schema. For code objects like: store procedures, functions, views etc. this would be more of a nuisance as the database will contain redundant code. This would happen if the deployment option DropObjectsNotInSource is not set to true.  This would make it harder to maintain the database and may cause future deployments to fail if schema binding is involved. However for tables or columns, again depending on deployment options, this will

A while ago I worked on a project to improve a website indexing within search engines. The project was initiated because there was a noticeable usage downward trend for the site. The main reason was the site was not being listed within relevant searches by search engines. This was because our content didn't emphasize the keywords within the search due to our HTML layout; URL structure and crawling errors. One aspect of the project was to improve the site layout and provide more information publicly.  The layout improvements were: to include the use of headers to highlight search keywords; a simpler layout to reduce HTML errors.  Providing more information was to help increase coverage of keywords.  Another improvement made to the site was the restructuring of the site URLs.  By making the URLs more human readable and converting the site search functionality to use ASP.Net routes. A site map was introduced to enable to help the search providers index our site of our static and s

Within this post I wish to share the methods I used to automate the deployment of my SQL Server database projects.  I needed to automate the deployment of my database projects within the build process so I could integrate the execution of my unit tests. As mentioned in a previous post: Integrating TSQLT with Team Foundation Build Services continuous build .  I also wanted to automate the deployment into the development, test and production environment for the following reasons: To empower the developers to do database deployment into the required environment and reducing the dependence on me. To reduce the complexity of deploying the database projects. To have an easy deployment process to document i.e. run this script. In a way to document the deployment of the database projects. Before I start I would like to highlight an invaluable project / solution file(s) that help with the automation.  These are "Profiles" which are used as configuration files for deployment.