I have a Visual Studio 2010 database project and I'd like to do a partial deployment, i.e. of specified objects. Is this possible? The only options I can see are to either do a full deployment or stop after generating the script.
For example, I'm changing many tables and stored procs but not everything is 100% finished and I'd like to push out a specific stored procedure to my test database, including its permissions, etc.
I read a little bit about SQL Server Data Tools, which apparently supports this, but I'm not clear on whether I'd have to migrate my database project to use that instead (would also need the ok from team lead), or if it's simply a plugin that would allow extra functionality.
Check out Schema Comparisons. They allow you to select the objects you want to deploy. They are available without SQL Server Data Tools.
A "partial deployment" is actually a little dangerous. Consider that you will have just built your database project, your entire database project, complete with the table changes, and it has built with no errors or warnings (right?). Now you want to deploy just your stored procedure, into a database that does not have the table changes.
Your stored procedure got no errors or warnings in the context of all the changes. Are you sure it will get no errors or warnings without those changes?
You should consider a source control solution to this problem. Save a copy of your stored procedure, revert to a version of the code that matches the database you'll be deploying to, then make your stored procedure changes to that. When you deploy, you will be checking to see if the stored procedure makes sense in the context of the database you'll be deploying into.
Related
I have created a new Sql 2008 Database Project in Visual Studio 2010. I imported the database objects and only kept the stored procedures. That all worked as expected. Where I have the problem is that it tries to deploy the entire set of procedures each time. I expect it to only create the deployment script for the delta. I am pretty sure that I combed every setting, but I can't find it. So if someone could first validate that this is possible and second tell me where to look. I need to do this because we only deploy the stored procedures with each release, the database schema is not modified.
Do a Schema compare of the project (as source) with the database where you want to deploy (as target). Once shcem comparison results are shown you have a choice to select which changes you want to deploy and then click the button "Export to T-SQL Editor". It will create the delta script.
I have an SQL 2008 database project in Visual Studio 2010 that is sync'ed on a regular basis from a schema comparison during the development phase. This same project is also under TFS source control. I have two environments, Debug and Production. Each environment is a single machine that runs both IIS and SQL Server. The production environment however has different data and log paths for the database D:\Data\ and E:\Logs\ versus my development server at the standard c:\program files\sql....\data.
What I'm trying to do is setup the way I transact my deployments from the debug to production environments. I've gotten WebDeploy 2.1 setup and I build my deployment packages in Visual Studio via the right-click context menu on the website project. I want to manually copy deployment packages to the production server via RDP, so there's no over the wire concerns here. The deployment package settings are setup to include all databases configured in Package/Publish SQL tab. In the Package/Publish SQL tab I don't pull data from data/schema from an existing database because I want to deploy from the SQL database project instead. So I just point to the pre-generated .sql script file located in my database project's /sql/release folder. To top it off, I generate the .sql script in the post-build events in the SQL project via VSDBCMD.exe /dd:- /a:Deploy /manifest:... so that a simple solution rebuild all, then website project deploy ensures I always have the latest .sql script in the deployment package.
This is great and all, but I have a major problem here I can't seem to overcome. It has to do with the database data and log files paths being different from debug to production environments. I actually receive an exception during the WebDeploy in IIS on the production server that says it can't find c:\programs files...\MyDatabase.mdf file. And what's scarey is after this exception, the entire database is deleted. The empty databases I create right before doing the deployment. Happen both times I tried messing around with it. I'm not sure how I feel about that, but I'm hoping I could find a reliable solution to this.
I have been feverishly looking for a way to change the paths during a deployment and have found many places that mention changing the paths in the *.sqlfiles.sql files under Schema Objects\Database level objects\Storage\Files because the path it tries to deploy to is the path specified in those because of the Schema Comparisons and Writes from the Debug SQL server database. Changing the paths here will work temporarily, until I do my next schema comparison and write, then the sqlfiles.sql files will get overwritten with the info from the Debug database again. And I don't want to have to remember to never update these files during a schema comparison because any mistake has the potential to delete the production database.
I think my salvation lies in my Release.sqlcmdvars file. It's a tease actually, I can see a place I "could" type the default database path, but it appears to a read-only field as it mentions "Location where database files are created by default (set when you deploy)." It would be grand if I could specify the paths here. Is there any way at all to specify the path in a variable here that would override the paths from the *.sqlfiles.sql files?
In the solution where I work at, there are two custom variables in the sqlcmdvars called Path1 and Path2 that I thought were reserved names that do such that. However, this doesn't work in my solution and the difference between the two solutions are the other solution gets deployed via TFS build controller. Doing the TFS build controller route isn't an option really because I opted out to save money while using a third party source control service.
Any help with this would be great. I have even gone so far as to create separate *.sqlfiles.sql files for debug and release and configured the dbproj file to use one or the other depending on the Configuration, but this doesn't seem to be working either. Also, using the custom PATH1 variable in the sqlfile.sql file like FILENAME = '$(PATH1)\Cameleon_log.ldf', doesn't work either. I seriously think it shouldn't be this difficult. Am I missing something simple here??
Thanks!
Okay, this was an exercise in futility. Apparently with out syncing with the target database during the script generation the script would be exactly what is needed to build the database from scratch. Even if I could override the file paths, the deployment would complain about database objects already existing. I needed to specify the connection string of the target database in the deploy settings so a comparison is done during the script generation and only the relevant differences are added to the script. I really wanted to avoid exposing my production SQL server to the outside world, but it is what it is. No need to override the paths anymore because it looks the database file paths are conveniently ignored during this comparison!!
I've been attempting to use Visual Studio 2010 schema compare to take updates from a Dev database and move it to a UAT environment.
The compare itself works fine, but the tool continually orders the update scripts incorrectly.
It will try to update a stored procedure first, then the view that the procedure depends on. If my view includes new fields that the procedure depends on, then it will fail the update.
I've attempted to force the dependency to be recognised by qualifying all references to the dependent views with the schema name (essentially dbo.view rather than view), as suggested in http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa833294.aspx
Is there any way to force the scripts to a particular order (tables, views then sprocs), or is there a way to tell how and why the dependencies are calculated so I can see what's going wrong?
I don't think that either of the things I was hoping to do are possible.
What I have learnt is that the refresh on the schema compare doesn't always seem to recalculate dependencies correctly.
Closing it and starting a new one worked, just refreshing the original didn't.
I'm using the Database project in visual studio 2010 to generate a script to deploy my database (and it's changes). This works great.
Is there a way to have Visual Studio database project generate a rollback script as well as the deployment script.
I'm not looking for rolling back the transaction while deploying; but say I deploy it and my stored procedure has an overlooked performance issue that comes up a week later that requires a rollback to the previous version of the database.
Is there a way to generate the rollback script at build/deploy time that will undo whatever changes the deployment script made.
EDIT: If we ignore that I'm using a database project: What is a good way to have an upgrade and downgrade path for a database generated?
This generation needs to be part of an automated build process.
To create a rollback script While doing a schema compare using VS2010, It is as simple as swapping the db names specified in the source and target.
This way VS2010 would create a rollback script which would have drop statements against your stored proc.
I've not seen anything like that.
I think you need to reconsider this approach, as you'd still need to fix the stored proc in your database project, otherwise you'd just be re-deploying the "bad" version the next time you deploy. (I'm sure you're already aware of that, but it doesn't help to point out the obvious sometimes!)
If you need to restore an old version of the sproc to the server in the mean time, I would have thought that the easiest thing to do would be to get the previous version from source control and manually deploy that.
You could create a backup of the database before the release and then just restore from the backup if things go wrong. Obviously you'd also loose any data changes (either made as part of the release or subsequently) since the backup was taken.
Another idea I had was to create a snapshot before the release. The operation to create a snapshot is very light weight. I'm not sure you'd want to keep the snapshot for a week, but if the release went wrong then I think it would be quicker to restore from a snapshot than from a full backup. I would be interested to hear any comments people have on this idea.
I usually create a solution folder in Visual Studio and put my DB scripts in them. I always use at least this set of scripts:
Drop model
Create model script
User functions
Stored procedures
Static data (lookup tables)
Test data (not deployed)
Then I simply combine them and run against an SQL Server so I'm able to recreate the whole DB in a single step (by combining these scripts into a single one and executing it).
Anyway. I've never used projects in either:
Visual Studio or
SQL Management Studio
I've tried creating SQL Server 2008 Database Project in Visual Studio 2010, but I'm somehow overwhelmed by all the possible server settings (which I prefer to stay default as set on the server anyway). So I'm a bit confused: Should I use this project template or should I just do the same thing I always did?
What do you use and why? What are advantages I may benefit from by using either?
If I were you I would continue to do it the way you are doing it. In fact I do! The advantages of having the actual .sql files right there in a folder for you to use/edit/look at in my opinion are far better than the advantages you get by using a DB project. DB Project would be used if you were doing something like Storage Reports, were you have to communicate with like 8 databases and compare then to 8 different databases and save result sets etc... Now don't get my wrong there are advantages of Database Projects, I just don't think they are actually doing much help when you have such a simple setup that works already.
Advantages of the SQL Server 2008 Database Project in VS10:
Not having to switch back and forth
from your current client you use to
communicate with your SQL server.
Decent Data and Schema compare tools.
Gives you a one-click way to reverse
engineer a database into source
control, and keep it up to date.
You can compare projects to physical
databases and vice-versa. (This makes it pretty easy to keep your database up to date, no matter where you make change it: file system database project, or in the physical database itself)
If the current tool your using is not specifically tailored to SQL Server, this one is.
Extremely helpful if you need to do
unit tests directly on the database
without using abstractions.
If you're looking for something a little less complicated, you might want to try SQL Source Control. This won't even require you to maintain scripts, as it doesn't this for you behind the scenes. It will, however, only work as a solution for you if you use either TFS or SVN. And it costs $295...
It has a 28-day trial period, so if you're happy to try it out, I'd be interested in your feedback.