So, I have written before about how to put your database into version control using database projects in Visual Studio. Even while having the scripts in the solution, there can be times when you can't exactly remember what you changed and needs to go out with your project deployment to the production database. Deploying files is easy because of tools like WinMerge, however deploying things to a database can get quite complicated. You could script both schemas and use WinMerge to see the differences between ... [More]

So, I'm sure you have been met with a similar scenario during development. You know the one that you have to rename a column or even drop a column in the database. This can be quite annoying if you are doing stored procedure based data access for your application. Once you change the column on the table, you have to figure out which stored procedures reference the column. They aren't always tough to find most of the time, but sometimes you are dealing with a column that may be referenced in many stored proc... [More]

So this is what it has come to anymore. Everyone is all about server side paging via SQL Server. As well they should be! It is so much faster and more efficient than having ADO or ADO.NET bring back a ton of records and then chop it to page it. However, there has always been some problems when trying to accomplish this task, especially using a SQL database that is pre 2005. This task is easier to accomplish in SQL 2005 and 2008 using the ROW_NUMBER() function. The part that gets flaky is having a dynamic o... [More]

Do you use database projects in Visual Studio? If not, then now is a good time to start. It is the best way I have found to source control my databases without actually sticking the database file itself in the repository. It is very simple to add to your solution and creates a default directory structure for your create scripts, change scripts and queries. Best of all the project will be recognized by source control and added to the source code repository. This means you can keep versioned scripts for maint... [More]