Professional Team Foundation Server

8.2. The Data Development Lifecycle

Like your conventional software developer, the database developer can now enjoy support for each stage of the data development lifecycle. Let's look at the tools and functionality in detail. To do that, you are going to walk through each stage of the lifecycle using the Northwind database (one of the default databases in SQL Server) as an example. Along the way, you will learn the basics of how to use Team Edition for Database Professionals, and will see some of how it integrates into Team Foundation Server.

8.2.1. Implementation

The implementation phase consists of defining your database and building all the objects in it, such as tables, views, and stored procedures. Team Edition for Database Professionals helps you do this by storing your schema in a new Visual Studio Project, called a database project. It stores all the information about your database as SQL files, making them easy for database professionals to understand and modify.

NOTE

Team Edition for Database Professionals does not support the use of graphical designers at this time. You must edit the raw SQL code to make all database changes. Support for graphical designers will be added in a future release.

For this example, you are going to see how to create a new database project, and then import the schema of an existing database into that project. We then cover how you can use the database project to manage your schema information, including how to use version control and work ...