Why does Visual Studio asks (Optionally) to add database .mdf file to be stored in project output folder? It's still is a requirement that .mdf file to be part of running SQL Server instance so that application can work with the database.
For instance if I stop the instance of SQL Server and run the application, it throws exceptions etc. I wonder why it stays in VS solution folders then? Any advantage of this?
I think this is generally to allow for the "User Instance" feature, which lets you make a copy of the MDF file for local debugging purposes (without impacting the database that's running within SQL Server).
You can see this URL for more information on how this feature works, but I would just ignore it, since it is deprecated and in SQL Server 2012 is replaced with a fundamentally better and different way of dealing with isolation and avoiding instance maintenance (no more AttachDbFileName nonsense).
Personally, I think it's much better to work with a single copy of the database, attached to a proper instance of SQL Server, because these other methods just seem far too convoluted and confusing for very little gain. But maybe that's just me.
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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.
Currently I'm using Visual Studio 2012 RC and SQL Server 2012 RTM.
I'd like to know how to re-deploy/re-create a test database for each test run.
Keep in mind I've a SQL Server database project for the database using Visual Studio 2012's template.
Actually I'm not very sure about an idea I got in my mind, but .testsettings file has Setup and cleanup scripts. Is this the way to go? For example, a PowerShell script reading the database project generated script and executing it against the database?
I guess there're better ways of doing that and it should be an out-of-the-box solution but I ignore it and Google doesn't help me in finding the right solution.
As mentioned you'll probably want to use the VS 2012 .Local.testsettings > Setup and Cleanup scripts to create / tear down you SQL Server database.
For the script you may want to use powershell with a .dacpac (rather than just a T-SQL script), since you are using a SSDT project. Here's a link to some example code - in particular you may want to take a look at the 'Deploy-Dac' command.
If you are unfamiliar with .dacpacs as the (build) output of SSDT-created database projects, take a look at this reference link.
Edit: Although this doesn't answer the question in a plain SQL Server way, an easy Entity Framework approach would be the following: I found that I could create and destroy my database every time correctly by using the DbContext.Database.CreateIfNotExists() and DbContext.Database.Delete() methods in my setup and cleanup phases of my tests.
The fastest solution, while a bit of a hack, is really straightforward. You can set the DB Projects properties under the debugging tab to "always re-created DB". Then test in two clicks, do a debug/build, then run all tests. You should get a freshly built DB on localDB for you tests to be ran against. You can also change the target for the debugging DB (again the DB projects properties) to whatever you want, so you can deploy to a .dacpac, or to an existing SQL DB or wherever. It means testing in two steps, and if your build is long, it may be annoying, but it works. Otherwise, I believe scripting is your only option.
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 have been asked to create an MVC web application in VS 2010, and was instructed to use a SQL express database for my data. I am using EF Code-First for creating and managing my data. The database was created in VS2010, and is attached via "AttachDBFilename" in the web.config.
I have used SQL CE before with MVC with no problems, however the attached SQL Express DB is causing weird issues.
For one thing, when I try to deploy the app, it fails and tells me that it cannot copy the database.mdf because it is in use by another process. I have NOT opened the database in VS2010 nor SSMS. Of course the program code accesses it - is there some reason that connection would remain open? I am using boilerplate code from the scaffolding.
I should mention that I use a ProjectInitializer.cs to create the sample data. It runs at every launch for the moment, since I am testing quite a bit.
The other problem I have is that if I delete the database, it fails to recreate it. It says that my windows account does not have access to the (now non-existent) database that it is trying to create. I literally have to create a new database with new name, as anything that was created previously (with that DB name) fails.
I assume there is some sort of residual info being left somewhere that is out of synch, but I don't know what it is. I've closed all connections to the file in VS 2010, deleted the files, both any found via VS2010 and any physical files I see in the app_data directory.
Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
Shut down the web server (Cassini, IIS, IIS Express) and try again. The file can remain locked if the web process is still referencing the file. In addition the loaded EF context will retain the db name. Ensure the visual studio browser isn't running in the tray still either.
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.