Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 06/28/05 01:23

Chad Richardson (chad@NIXSPAM_chadrichardson.com) writes:
> Yes, very nasty. Luckily my hosting company (ReadyHosting) was able to
> restore everything from their backup and the transaction logs.
>
> Normally, whenever I make DB table changes I save the scripts and put them
> in a "To Promote to Prod" directory, then use SQL Analyzer to apply those
> changes to prod. But changes to views don't prompt for you to save these
> changes as a script.
>
> What specifically do you mean by "the version control system"? (As you can
> tell by my question, I know just enough of SQL Server to be dangerous, so
> any insight on how to handle version contol is appreciated.)

"version control system" or "source code control" is nothing specific
to SQL Server, but fundamentals of software engineering. In a version
control system, developers adds their files. Later a file may be
checked out, maybe by the same developer, maybe by someone else. The
person who checked out the file, performs some changes to it, and
then checks back in again, after proper testing.

When it's getting time to make a build for an integration test, someone
who is a "build master", "configuration manager" or similar puts some
label on all the most recent versions of files, to create a baseline.
During tests, bugs may be uncovered and fixed. The fixes can be inserted
into that baseline, or a new baseline be created.

Eventually, the thing is put into production and a baseline is created for
this. Now, development of 2.0 starts. However, there may be need to
fix bugs in production as well. Say that version 12 of file foo.cs
was in the shipment baseline. By the time a critical bug in production
is discovered, the file at version 14 for 2.0 development. But you
check out version 12, and fix that, and check it in as 12.1 - you
have now created a branch.

The exact terminology for these various actions are different from
product to product. The most commonly used version-control system
in the Microsoft world is Visual SourceSafe. It performs branching
different that about any other product. VSS has a lot of short-comings
as a version-control system, but it's easy to start with, and it's OK
for smaller teams.
--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server SP3 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/techinfo/productdoc/2000/books.asp

[Back to original message]