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I have just started working with a new company in a very small IT department, and an even smaller dev team (just 2 developers including me). We mainly develop in house web applications for the company.

Now my background is in desktop applications so this job comes with a slight learning curve for me having never developed ASP.Net web applications before. Currently we do not use TFS however I have made the suggestion and it is something we are going to be adopting soon.

I am also considering recommending we move our SQL databases into database projects as currently we do nightly backups to protect the data but all the updates are manual, we connect to the database and execute queries etc.

Im not a DBA but in my last job we were in the process of migrating our databases to database projects and the DBAs seemed to love the idea. What would the benefits and potential downfalls of this be? Would it aid us with updating databases in our live enviroment after development has been done? Obviously we dont want to loose any data but just update tables / Stored Procs etc.

As a side question I have very limited knowledge of TFS, and although we are going to be using it to handle our version control is it possible to use TFS to update our live websites automatically once development has finished?

Sorry if this is quite a broad question, I am attempting to research this myself but I would like to hear from people who actually use the products and do these things.

Thanks

Purplegoldfish
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About database projects: I, and several dba's I know, have had mixed experiences with them. I'm not sure they are exactly where they should be at this time but it may be simply a function of how I work. The deployment model is... difficult and can result in some unexpected behavior. If you go this route test test test to make sure you understand exactly what's happening.

If you are just trying to get version control for the database you might consider SQL Source Control from Red Gate. It looks pretty nice and hooks into TFS. I used one of the early versions (beta and 1.0) for awhile and was very happy with it. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure why I don't have it here... ;)

As far as deploying out of TFS, you can absolutely do this. We have a build server set up so that whenever code is checked in the build server automatically spins up to compile and deploy it out to one of our testing sites. Look here for a primer to get you started. This does require some configuration on your web server to properly support and the documentation is spotty at best.

Once you are happy with the test area, you can hook something into changes to the Build Quality so that it pushes the code to a staging or even production server... Or simply have a build setup to recompile and deploy out there. Although I don't recommend doing production pushes this way. Not because of a technical issue, but rather a timing one. It's usually much faster to just copy / paste from one location to production when necessary thereby limiting downtime.

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NotMe
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  • Thanks for the reply, at the moment TFS pushing new code out to a testing server is very much where I would like to aim for. Having automated deployment would be a big advantage to us. As for my reasons for Database Projects It is partially version control and partly because I would like a way to both manage the database structure easily, and to deploy it in an automated method which I feel would be less prone to error than manually applying each table / stored proc etc – Purplegoldfish Nov 04 '11 at 15:22
  • +1 @ChrisLively, so do you not use database projects? I'm not a big fan of database projects in visual studios for large data centric projects. When you mentioned "unexpected behaviors" can you elaborate on that? I'm trying to figure out if I've dismissed it too prematurely. Also, I've played around with Redgate sourcecontrol and it's a very neat tool. But I feel you can do almost all that it can do using TFS and TFS PowerTools (give you windows shell extensions). In other words, the price may not be worth it at $500 per developer. – sam yi Dec 12 '13 at 15:51
  • @samyi: It's been a couple years since I've bothered with DB projects due to the deployment issues. One item that comes to mind though is that when deploying it would attempt to *move* the database files on the target server to match the locations in use on the source server which is just asinine. The MS model for selecting what goes and what doesn't is brain dead requiring WAY too many mouse clicks to turn off what you don't want and even then items you deselected might be pushed because it thinks an item you selected depends on it. – NotMe Dec 12 '13 at 16:58
  • @samyi: the above items are potentially disastrous when deploying to a production environment. So because I can't trust it I don't use it. I did take a look at the updates in VS2012, but the changes appeared to be superficial. They really need to get rid of the tree structure approach. – NotMe Dec 12 '13 at 17:00