Professional SQL Server® 2005 Performance Tuning

15.5. Managing Change

Change management is one aspect of deployment that most people tend to forget. A production environment is usually a finely tuned environment that is very sensitive to change. In most real-life scenarios database administrators are reluctant to make changes to production environments unless those changes, have been thoroughly tested. The reality, however, is that changes do happen and sometimes these changes go unnoticed until problems start creeping up on some parts of the application. This is the reason why changes have to be managed and duly recorded. Changes in a database environment can be of various sorts: Database schema changes, stored procedure code changes, database hardware changes and so on. What is important here is to ensure that whatever the change may be, there is always a plan in place to back out of the changes if things don't go as expected. For code-related changes, it is important to ensure that version control is in place. This can easily be accomplished through the use of software such as Microsoft Visual Source Safe. Visual Source Safe allows users to maintain multiple versions of the same code and also promotes collaboration and sharing through the process of checking out and checking in changes. Another great tool to use is the Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals. This tool, in addition to allowing version control, also allows for rules to be set to ensure standardization of check-in code. Schema changes can be ...