Microsoft has added support for database professionals in the latest version of Team Edition for Visual Studio.
A new client that will provide database admins and programmers with the same versioning and management tools used by other developers will be part of the next version of the Visual Studio Team System. A report from Internet News said the Team Edition for Database Professional would be needed since database pros work differently with their databases than application developers do.
“There has always been somewhat of a disconnect between developer organizations and database teams,” Matt Nunn, senior product manager, developer division at Microsoft said in the article. “Database teams run against a live system, apps teams build apps in a closed environment.”
By using the Database Professional version of Visual Studio, database programmers can do the kind of work with schemas and data in a test environment that they would normally have to do with a live database.
The Data Generator in Team Edition for Database simulates live data. When schema changes are made with the Database client, the tool shows how that will impact the database more accurately.
Version control in the client provides the same features for schema that it does for source code. The Team System tracks check ins and outs for schemas, and shows who worked on the schema.
There are also tools to automatically generate reports on aspects of a project, like who has worked on it and where they have progressed. One analyst cited in the article did express concern over database pros being exposed to “the beast that is Visual Studio 2005”:
“For many of them, development is writing some SQL scripts or a stored procedure or two. So my concern is will they feel comfortable with an IDE built off Visual Studio or will they find that overwhelming?” said Greg DeMichillie, lead analyst for developer tools at Directions on Microsoft.
“I think the single biggest thing that the product does is it puts some formal structure in place around how database professionals manage the database,” he said. “No dev team would let anyone make changes to the code without monitoring who did it. Every team has a structure in place to control how changes are made. This provides the same thing.”
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
