Here at Conchango there has been quite a bit of discussion by certain people (JRJ, Dan Perrin, Mick Horne amongst others) about how best to leverage the capabilities of Visual Studio Team System For Database Professionals (DBPro for short).
It is generally believed that the cost of DBPro is prohibitive. Each seat requires a seperate license and, whilst I don't know how much they are, I know they are expensive - in the region of a few thousand dollars. If you are considering giving a license to each of your developers then you are entitled to question whether it is a valid expense.
I have a slightly different opinion however. The scenario above assumes that every developer on your project is going to get their own copy but there is no reason why that need be the case. On my current project that is indeed not the case - we have not seen the need to give DBPro to all of our developers. Our usage of DBPro is as follows:
- We have just one project-level instance of DBPro and that is installed on our continuous integration build server
- All T-SQL code development occurs in SQL Server Management Studio (so none of our developers have DBPro installed) and under no circumstances is it done in Visual Studio.
- We use our one DBPro instance to sync the developed code that sits in our dev DB with our "baseline" schema that is stored in source control
- DBPro is MSBuild compliant so the DBPro projects are built as part of the continuous integration build
- As JRJ suggested on an internal mail, you need to "build a clean db to the latest release using create scripts and then do a diff from the previous version and use a tool to create a diff / alter script". In other words, you need a tool to help you with incremental releases. We use DBPro to do this and it works fine.
I do not consider DBPro to be a T-SQL development tool that is on a par with SQL Server Management Studio and until such time arrives one license of DBPro will prove to be sufficient. When DBPro contains all of the rich Visual Studio functionality such as Intellisense and code analysis we may consider giving DBPro to all of our developers and that is when the issue of cost will be discussed. With only one license though the cost really isn't an issue.
-Jamie
P.S. If you want to make sure you don't miss the blogs from the guys listed above, and others, make sure you subscribe to the main feed for blogs.conchango.com at http://blogs.conchango.com/MainFeed.aspx