How should you build your database from source control?

Question

There has been some discussion on the SO community wiki about whether database objects should be version controlled. However, I haven\'t seen much discussion about t

Answer 1

I strongly believe that a DB should be part of source control and to a large degree part of the build process. If it is in source control then I have the same coding safe guards when writing a stored procedure in SQL as I do when writing a class in C#. I do this by including a DB scripts directory under my source tree. This script directory doesn't necessarily have one file for one object in the database. That would be a pain in the butt! I develop in my db just a I would in my code project. Then when I am ready to check in I do a diff between the last version of my database and the current one I am working on. I use SQL Compare for this and it generates a script of all the changes. This script is then saved to my db_update directory with a specific naming convention 1234_TasksCompletedInThisIteration where the number is the next number in the set of scripts already there, and the name describes what is being done in this check in. I do this this way because as part of my build process I start with a fresh database that is then built up programatically using the scripts in this directory. I wrote a custom NAnt task that iterates through each script executing its contents on the bare db. Obviously if I need some data to go into the db then I have data insert scripts too. This has many benefits too it. One, all of my stuff is versioned. Two, each build is a fresh build which means that there won't be any sneaky stuff eking its way into my development process (such as dirty data that causes oddities in the system). Three, when a new guy is added to the dev team, they simply need to get latest and their local dev is built for them on the fly. Four, I can run test cases (I didn't call it a "unit test"!) on my database as the state of the database is reset with each build (meaning I can test my repositories without worrying about adding test data to the db).

This is not for everyone.

This is not for every project. I usually work on green field projects which allows me this convenience!