I must have struck a chord with the folks at Red Gate recently when I wrote about Automated database releases with TeamCity and Red Gate. Inadvertently, I managed to get this post out right in the final stages of their work on SQL Source Control 2 which added the ability to version static data. This was pretty opportune timing and caused me to rewrite – and significantly simplify – a fair swathe of the post.
Clearly the post was a glowing endorsement of their tools, and rightly so. In conjunction with TeamCity, they’ve helped me to fill a fairly gaping hole in the CI process and bring the DB up to a first class citizen with the application tier. They asked me if I’d like to contribute the article to Simple-Talk and it’s largely consistent with the original. It’s now online here:
Continuous Integration for SQL Server Databases
If you’re not versioning your databases or if you’re still manually releasing them or writing laborious change scripts, this is worth a read. Once you go down the DB CI path, looking back at the way things used to be is just downright scary!