Visual Studio Team Edition for Database professionals

In a post earlier this year Karl complained that database IDEs have not seen the same evolution of new features (like build systems, refactoring, etc.) that developer IDEs (like Visual Studio or Eclipse) enjoyed.

This week I was at a Microsoft talk where I was reminded of this post. They showed the current CTP version of the newly announced “Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals“. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/dbpro/ for more information; follow the “Announcing!” link and you’ll get some more details and also some screenshots.

The outstanding features of the VS/DP (my own littele abreviation, since the full name is a little bulky) included:

• tight intergration with/in VS2005  
• integration with other Team System features such as bug tracking and SCM
• Reengeneering of existing DBs or SQL scripts
• Refactoring for DB objecs (e.g. renaming a table changes references within SPs, etc.)
• compare two DB instances (e.g. development vs. production), schema as well as data, and generate update scripts (full or incremental)
• automatically generate unit tests for SPs
• automatically generate test data (configurable, honoring DB constrains and relationships, even based on a quantitative analysis of a production database)

As I said, this is currently a CTP and the final protduct shall be available “by the end of the year” (or so the MS consultant said).

The good part is that this will get the database developers “closer” to the rest of the team, i.e. more seamlessly intergrated. This is in accordance with the whole Team System approach that already got project management aspects as well as architects and testing on the boat, with web and windows designers jsut around the corner by means of Expression.

Now comes the upsetting part (especially for you Karl, sorry): VS/DP will support SQL Server 2000 and 2005. Period. No mentioning of other databases either on the web site or from the MS consultant I talked to.

Now, I wouldn’t expect Microsoft to support Oracle or DB2 out of the box, why should they after all. But for enterprise development those two DBMSs are often the predominant database systems – no sense in arguing about that. Since Microsoft claims to have a very open system with Team System, perhaps the other big players (or some ISV) will come up with similar integration for non-MS databases. 

That’s all for now folks,
AJ.NET

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