Does Visual Studio Team Services Build have Sql Server instance for database tests?

Question

As part of our CI pipeline, we've configured Visual Studio Team Services build to do the build steps and run unit tests against a Sql Server database. However, our current setup uses a database stored on a separate VM. These tests run slowly and the test execution times out after 30 minutes.

Does VSTS provide ability to configure an online db for this purpose, or what other options do I have (apart from code changes) to speed up database access and/or extend the timeout period?

Answer 1

If your tests can be executed inside SQL Server LocalDB, you could leverage that to run directly on the agent. On Azure you of course also use a SQL Azure instance.

If that doesn't work, consider building your own build agent on a fast Azure VM and installing both the VSTS Agent and the SQL Server instance on that.

Lastly, you can register the VSTS Agent on an on-premise server, likely how you ran these tests before you moved to VSTS.