Yesterday I had the pleasure of presenting at TechEd Israel 2008. It was a great experience!

My Session went very well, if I do say so myself. I talked about controlling your database lifecycle with data dude.

In any case, if you were in my talk, I’d love to hear your comments (good or bad!) about it so that I can either feel good about it, or get better for next time.

Thanks to everyone that wake up for the talk – it was very well attended despite the time (9:00 AM after the midnight party…).

You can download here slides and demo:

Tags: Events, Lectures, Team System 2008, TechEd Israel 2008, VSTS DB Pro

Next week I’ll give a session at TechEd 2008 In Eilat, Israel. The session will introduce you how you can control your database changes and integrate it into your agile development methodology.

Do you want to control your database changes?

Do you want to test your database with unit test and even run static analysis on it?

Do you want better life and easier deployment of database schema changes to production database?

If one of your answers is YES, come to hear me.

Session Details:

• Session Name: ALM403: Control your Database Lifecycle with Data Dude
• Level: 400
• Time: 8/4/2008, 9:00 AM
• Location: Hilton Hotel, Ofir-Adom Hall

Session’s Agenda:

• What is Data Dude?
• Data Dude Features
• Test Your Database!
• Build & Deploy (MSBuild & Team Build)
• Case Study: nuconomy
• Q & A
• Summary

Microsoft opened up the meetings application at http://www.face2facemeeting.com/teched/. If you want to meet me and talk with me on development, WCF, LINQ, ALM or anything else – contact me! I’ll be glad to see you!

Meet you there…

Tags: Events, Lectures, MSBuild, Team Build 2008, Team System 2008, VSTS DB Pro

As you know, I will be presenting a presentation in TechEd 08 Israel.  Microsoft opened up the meetings application at http://www.face2facemeeting.com/teched/.

If you are attending TechEd 08 Israel , you can set an appointment with me, by using this application.

To find me there navigate to the Find Participants screen and looking for ALM or מאור as keyword.

My presentation details:

• Name: ALM403: Control your Database Lifecycle with Data Dude
• Time: 8/4/2008, 9:00 AM
• Location: Hilton Hotel, Ofir-Adom Hall

I’m always happy to answer questions – so come meet me in Tech Ed, and let me know how you liked my presentation!

Tags: Events, Lectures, Team System 2008, TechEd Israel 2008, VSTS DB Pro

Visual Studio 2005 Team System Database Professional post Service Release 1 (SR1) roll-up package 1, is now available.

Problems that are fixed:

• Inconsistent revalidation of database object definitions when you close and then reopen a Visual Studio database project
• A database project cannot be deployed if the project contains interdependent inline functions
• If you use a four-part name to reference a table, you may receive an incorrect syntax exception
• Database Professional Interpreter does not handle the “sp_executesql” parameter correctly
• In a Visual Studio 2005 database, you cannot import a schema that was created by using the SQL Server 2000 compatibility mode
• Error message when you use Design-Time Extensibility (DTE) objects: “Do you want to reload”
• Cross-database references cause slow performance when you load a project
• Schema Compare crashes the Visual Studio IDE when databases contain different versions of assemblies
• Schema Compare does not correctly generate the update script for a stored procedure
• The schema script is not generated when triggers or views that have the same name exist
• Error message when you build a deployment script: “MSB4018: The ‘SqlBuildTask’ task failed unexpectedly”
• After Schema Compare obtains the latest project files from Source Control, Schema Compare indicates that databases are different

For more details, see knowledge base article KB941278.

You can download the roll-up from the Microsoft Connect site at:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=11229

Tags: Team System, VSTS DB Pro

As I posted earlier, I’ll speak at the next Tech-Ed in Eilat (6-8 April 2008). This is a great honor for me!

My session will be about MSBuild & VSTS for Database Professional.

The session is title less for now…. If you have any idea – please send it to me.

In order to give you a great presentation, help me to decide about it’s content:

• Do you have any unanswered questions around VSTS for Database Professionals?
• What do you like most and least about VSTS for Database Professionals?
• Do you have any stories you would be willing to share if you used VSTS for Database Professionals?

The next days are critical… I’ll choose a title and announce the session’s agenda. If you have any suggestions, thoughts, advices,wish list, feedbacks or anything – comment it here or send me and email please.

Thanks!

Tags: Events, Team System 2008, TechEd Israel 2008, VSTS DB Pro

VSTS for DB Professionals (aka "Data Dude" or "VSDBPro") provides great tools for schema and data compare.

Like most Visual Studio-based project systems, the core tasks inside the VSDBPro project implemented as MSBuild tasks. The two core activities for Database Projects (.dbproj), “Build” and “Deploy” are implemented by two MSBuild tasks named “SqlBuildTask” and “SqlDeployTask.”

Sometimes, we also need to automate the schema and data compare processes. We can do it with new MSBuild dedicated tasks that shipped with Power Tools for Data Dude Currently available for VSTS 2005)

• SqlDataCompareTask: allows you to compare the content of tables within two databases from the command line using MSBuild
• SqlSchemaCompareTask: allows you to compare schemas between two database from the command line using MSBuild

How should you use it?

First, install the Power Tools. Download from here. (notice that the power tools requires Data Dude Service Release 1 installed).

After you installed the power tools you can use the tasks in your MSBuild script.

Example:

  <!--Import the settings-->  <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0 \TeamData\Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.PowerTools.Tasks.targets"/>

  <Target Name ="DataCompare">    <SqlDataCompareTask       SourceConnectionString="Data Source=(.);Integrated Security=True;Pooling=False"        SourceDatabaseName="SourceDB"        TargetConnectionString="Data Source=(.);Integrated Security=True;Pooling=False"        TargetDatabaseName="TargetDB"        OutputPath = "$(temp)"        OutputFileName = "DataCompare.sql"/>  </Target>

Notice that the task does not allow you to compare against the project right now. Same way you can use the SqlSchemaCompareTask.

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\Microsoft\VisualStudio\v8.0\TeamData\Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.PowerTools.Tasks.targets"/><Target Name ="SchemaCompare">    <SqlSchemaCompareTask    SourceConnectionString="$(SourceConnectionString)"    SourceDatabaseName="$(TargetDatabase)"    TargetConnectionString="$(TargetConnectionString)"    TargetDatabaseName="$(TargetDatabase)"    OutputPath = "$(IntermediateOutputPath)"    OutputFileName = "$(TargetDatabase)SchemaCompare.sql"    IgnoreChecks ="true"/></Target>

The properties exposed by the MSBuild tasks are documented via an accompanying XSD file located in:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 
8\Xml\Schemas\1033\MSBuild\Microsoft.VisualStudio.TeamSystem.Data.PowerTools.Tasks.xsd

Tags: MSBuild, VSTS DB Pro

I built a big DB Dude project from MSBuild command line and got a timeout error.

MSBUILD : Build error TSD158: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

The default timeout for query execution is 60 seconds and stored in the registry. We can extend the query timeout by changing these values. The registry entries are:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\DBPro\Database\QueryTimeoutSeconds

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\DBPro\Database\LongRunningQueryTimeoutSeconds

Tags: MSBuild, Team System, VSTS DB Pro

The Data DUDE team announced that Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Service Release 1 is ready for consumption!

To summarize the knowledgebase article, the following features have been added:

• Cross-database references: You can reference objects within different databases by using database project references or by referencing a database metafile (.dbmeta).
• Improved SQL Server file groups support: You can define files within file groups as database project properties instead of having to create files and file groups within the pre-deployment storage script.
• Variables: Variables can now be defined in the database properties and referenced from your deployment deployment scripts.

The Service Release is made available in 9 languages:

• Italian – Italy
• Chinese – Taiwan
• Korean – Korea
• English – United States
• Chinese – China
• French – France
• German – Germany
• Spanish (Traditional Sort) – Spain
• Japanese – Japan

The knowledge base (KB) article describing the service release can be found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/936612/

The actual download page can be found here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=9810808c-9248-41a5-bdc1-d8210a06ed87&displaylang=en

Tags: Team System, VSTS DB Pro

Yesterday I gave a session about Team System For Database Professionals in the Are you Ready 2008 event. The audience had good time and went away with valuable knowledge about Team System For Database Professionals .

You can find the slide decks from the session here.

If you have any feedback about the lecture, I’d like to hear it!

Enjoy!

Tags: Lectures, Team System, VSTS DB Pro

One way to generate data in DB Dude is to use the Regular Expression generator, but using regular expressions can be intimidating…

There is a great post by gert with list of RegEx expressions.

You can find it here.

Tags: Team System, VSTS DB Pro