Professional Team Foundation Server

8.1. Why This New Edition Is Needed

Today, you would be very hard pressed to find any application that doesn't have some sort of data component. Just as a developer would be responsible for code within the software development lifecycle (SDLC), the database professional is responsible for the development of data assets within the data development lifecycle (DDLC), which is illustrated in Figure 8-1.

Figure 8.1. Figure 8-1

The important focus for most development companies is process improvement and predictability. The challenge is to find how a database professional can effectively apply engineering principles. First, the database schema is very hard to manage. How does one version a database? You can create snapshots but often, governance rules such as Sarbanes-Oxley prevent the extraction of data for such purposes. In addition, even with the best of intentions, you may lose data during backups. How do you test and deploy a database? A surprising number of database developers simply roll their changes into a production database without the benefit of testing. One of the big reasons for this is that the tools are simply not available or too expensive to use. A lot of the administrative tasks that you would associate with database management involve automation scripting to make a database easy to administer.

NOTE

Team Edition for Database Professionals currently supports SQL Server ...