Ed Elliott's Agile SQL Club

I like writing go (golang not the batch separator) and one of the things that I like is that if you want to use something from github you literally type “go get https://github.com/user/repo” and the code is downloaded and installed ready to be used.

When you create a new SSDT project it is created (at the moment) as a SQL Server 2014 project which is annoying when you are on something else.

My session yesterday was recorded, apart from the fact that me and mark were having a chat for about 25 minutes before it kicked off it seemed to work quite well: Skip forward to 24:32 to get to the actual content.

If you already have a source code repository for your app code or other databases or you have another team that uses source control then just use theirs.

I had a lot of fun yesterday presenting my talk on how to go from not having your database in version control to deploying to a CI database, running unit tests and generating deployment scripts for a QA/Prod database so effectively how to build a fully fu…

Niche tool of the day If you know what a deployment contributor is and have wanted to see what steps were in a plan and have got bored setting a breakpoint in visual studio and using the watch window or something to display the steps in a plan, you might…

To help with this scenario (it is pretty specific): You have a table that has columns that you do not know about when you create the dacpac, possibly you have a customer who modifies your schema after you deploy.

In my deployment filter I have been asked a couple of times to allow columns that exist on a table that do not exist in a dacpac to be ignored so that they are deleted.

I am going to ignore the fact that people don’t want to install visual studio on a build server, in the future there will likely be a way to install just the required components rather than everything.

I installed the 2016 SSMS client recently and in one way or another any of my apps that I have written that use the DacFx ScriptDom have all broken in slightly different ways.

I wrote a test earlier and forgot one of the two cardinal rules about tSQLt so I was running my test suite and the test did not run, I re-deployed and it still didn’t run so I thought I would create this handy list of things to check that mean that even w…

The slides are up: https://github.com/GoEddie/SQL-Server-Containers Any questions shout!

Really excited by my first post on medium, haven’t really used it before but found it to be a really nice tool: https://medium.com/@edelliott.the.agilesql.club/let-s-start-doing-profes…

Last night I had a lot of fun presenting on one of my favorite topics, MARS and SQL Server protocols including a rather fun live demo.

I see questions pretty regularly on stack overflow and the ssdt msdn forum that is some variation on “I am doing a publish through visual studio and it doesn’t quite do what I want” or “I want to publish the database when I press F5 except when I don’t wa…

I worked on a project where we had two SSDT projects with different versions of SQL, one 2012 and one 2008.

Traditionally database developers have shared a database and while this certainly made sense when everyone had a limited amount of ram and a few hundred megabytes of hard disk space it has been a while since we have had a development machines without enou…

This is part of a series on how to take the Adventureworks database and bring it in line with modern standards.

This is part of a series on how to take the Adventureworks database and bring it in line with modern standards.

Whether we use a tool to generate upgrade scripts or we write manual test scripts for database changes there are a few things that we should bear in mind to ensure we do not break existing databases.

When you use SSDT to deploy database changes you can include a pre/post deploy script which is run after the dacpac and database has been deployed.

In the spirit of having apps that do just one thing I have put a really small .net app on github that tries to create a connection to a SQL Server database and just keeps retrying until it is available: https://github.com/GoEddie/WaitForSQL What?

In my previous post on running SQL Server in a container I showed how you could use the Spoon (https://spoon.net) products to start an instance of SQL Server without having to install it: https://the.agilesql.club/Blog/Ed-Elliott/Containers/Run-SQL-Server…

This is part of a series on how to take the Adventureworks database and bring it in line with modern standards.

Containers are one of the big things at the moment, Microsoft has recently announced that they will be bringing official support to Windows.

It is a constant source of frustration for some people that it is hard to download SSDT or SSDT-BI or you download the wrong thing.

It isn’t a Pre compare script When you use SSDT to deploy your dacpac, a pre deployment script lets you run some T-SQL scripts before the script which brings your database up to date with your dacpac.

This is part of a series on how to take the Adventureworks database and bring it in line with modern standards.

This is part of a series on how to take the Adventureworks database and bring it inline with modern standards.

What am I doing?

I see the same question again and again “I am using SSDT but it takes a long time to publish changes, how do I make it faster?”

I have put the code for MergeUi on github now: https://github.com/GoEddie/MergeUi That is all.

What is MergeUi?

Hopefully this should put the ORM debate to bed, either use an ORM or don’t but please don’t access tables directly… There are obviously reasons behind all of this but if you follow this golden rule you will have a happy DBA and user base.

When you deploy your Sql Server code, there are two approaches, there is the manual way and the automated “compare & deploy” way.

BIML, you either love it or hate it - either you use it to totally generate hundreds of packages or a bucket load of data flow components all at the push of a button or you are perfectly happy using the SSIS editor, you can see how the package is made up…

I had the honour of talking at the excellent Sql Saturday Exeter this morning and wanted to share my slides and say thanks to the organisers, sponsors and everyone who came along to my session - I really enjoyed it and I hope you did to.

It is sometimes useful to be able to use sqlpackage.exe to create a script that can be deployed manually or still automatically but at a later date plus you may not want to give the user or process that does this sysadmin permissions just so that it can g…

Ok so you have created an SSDT project and are currently congratulating yourself on how awesome and cool you are but then you realise that your project is like an empty void, completely devoid of any emotion, love or joy - there is no schema and code in t…

UPDATE I went and built this into my add-in for SSDT, more details https://the.agilesql.club/blog/Ed-Elliott/2015-11-17/Create-Stub-tSQLt-t… and https://the.agilesql.club/Projects/SSDT-Dev-Pack Generating tSQLt tests from a dacpac I use SSDT and tSQLt in…

I was reading a white paper from a Sql Server tools vendor about how to integrate their tools with SSDT and while it was very interesting there were a couple of inaccuracies and I wanted to clear one of them up and also to help people understand that alth…

Calling all London/Sussex Sql Developers does this sound like you?

In part 3 of this series of blogs on “getting more agile” I am going to look at unit testing and why we need to do it.

What is it?

In the second part of this series on getting more agile and bringing our Sql Server development practices up to date I am going to talk about why you should get your database under source control.

I generally write T-SQL code in SSDT (Sql Server Data Tools) and find that I often publish to my local database instance and then test the actual code in SSMS, or at least debug the code in SSMS - whether this is using the Sql debugger or modifying procs…

K-SSIS-ed A re-envisioned IDE for SSIS packages, jump here SSDT Dev Pack A few helpers to make using SSDT slightly better, the killer feature for me is quickly deploying the proc or view you are looking at to a database - this means you can write code, qu…

In this series of posts I am going to talk about what it is we need to do, as Sql developers and DBAs to improve our working practices so that we take advantage of modern development patterns and practices to improve the quality of our work, the time it t…

NOTE: THIS WAS WRITTEN IN 2015, it is now 2020 - that is 5 years so please consider this a historical artifact that is probably out of date.

**Update** I have noticed that these cmd files are missing from recent ssdt builds, to enable logging see Kevin’s comment: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ssdt/archive/2014/07/15/sql-server-data-tools-ju… **/update I was helping someone get a deployment filter wo…