Steven Wright Blog

I have been working with Visual Studio Database projects starting with Database Professional to its successor SQL Server Data Tools. Within this post I wish to share some of the project topologies that I have used to manage my project databases requirements Before starting I would like to cover the 2 ways that database projects can be referenced.  As these methods play an important part of the projects topologies without having to develop code. External Referencing When adding a database reference and setting the options of database name or, optional, server name with a literal / variable value will configure the reference as external.  This will mean any SQL objects within the reference will need to be referred by using 3/4 part naming.  Also the referenced DACPAC / project will need be to deployed first, separately, before deploying the current project. Composite Referencing Creating a database reference but not setting the database name / server name will confi...

Over the years SQL Server database development has evolved from non-structured tools (Query Analyser/Management Studio) to fully structured development tools (Visual Studio Database Professionals/SQL Server Data Tools). However there many important aspects of database development which hasn't changed over the years. One of which I would like to cover within this blog post is the database files configuration especially within Microsoft development tools: SSDTS and VSDB-Pro. Getting your database files size and growth incorrectly configured can hurt your database performance. As on a project we had our first test release into production of our data warehouse and run our ETL process. At the time the databases had to take on the default file settings of the model database. After the process completed within three hours our data base files all grew in excess of 40GB. We did another test release, after tearing down the environment, with database file settings worked into the deployment ...

I have been working with the new SQL server data tools database project. This is going to be the successor to database professional tool, also known as data dude. There have been several differences to how this product works. One of them is the new tool project folder structure. There is now no folder structure within the project which means any file is automatically created into the root folder of the project. This is unlike database professionals, which had 2 comprehensive folder structures, the options were: by object type folder tree or schema related folder tree. My preference was always the object type folder structure, were script files which contain similar objects were all stored in the same folder e.g.: tables under a table folder, primary keys under the keys folder, views under a view folder etc. If you missed the object tree folder structure, like I have, there is a method to create this structure very quickly within your new data base project by using the following steps...

Collation plays an important role within the database, as it sets out how the SQL Server has to manage string data within storage & queries, yet I don’t script out the collation when scripting out my databases.   So why don’t I script out the collation if it so important? Its because if the collation is specified but not used properly within the database it can cause some of most common problems, like “Cannot resolve collation conflict for EQUAL TO operation” or “Cannot resolve collation conflict for UNION operation”. These errors are caused when string data within different collations are being compared or combined into the same result set; this is nothing new so why talk about collation now? Well it’s to do with the release of Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals (VSTDB) something I think needed to be taken in consideration if this is being used to manage the database side of the project.   A cause for theses types of problem is when a table is ...