Visual Studio 2010 Database Project Deployment Strategy

Question

I've just read the VS 2010 Database Project Guidance document (link to guidance document) and I'm still none the wiser about what's a sensible strategy for Continuous Integration DB builds and Unit Testing the DB.

We currently have our DB project in the same solution as our application and build the whole solution on check-in, is deploying the DB with every build practical?

Should we separate the DB projects to another solution and then they'd get built less often so deploying on build would be more sensible?

Should we forget about automatically deploying all together and just make that a manual step?

How do you deploy databases for Database Unit Test projects?

There's a lot of information in the guidance document but no definitive answers.

Thanks Ben

Answer 1

It depends what your goals are. What environment(s) are you considering deploying to on every build?

How often, and where, you deploy to is usually determined by your QA and/or release processes. I'm assuming you don't want to auto-deploy to the production database on every check-in, chances are you have a QA process that needs to happen first.

So I'd be looking at what environments do you have, what are they used for, and how often would you like them to be updated. It is pretty common to have a QA environment that is updated nightly, but updating it on every checkin would disrupt QA activities.

Some people have an environment that is deployed to on every build and automated tests are run against it, if you have this then deploying there every build would make sense.

You can build DB projects without having to deploy them, the build and deploy are separate concepts when it comes to DB projects in Visual Studio.