Posted by Erland Sommarskog on 06/11/07 21:28

(cuneyt.barutcu@illinois.gov) writes:
> Thanks a lot for your answer Erland,
> I was wondering about the tool you were using to accomplish the tasks
> you mentioned. Can you tell me what it is called. and the names of
> similar tools.

It's an inhouse tool that I developed myself.

As for commercial tools on the market, I don't have a very good overview
what is available. But Microsoft offers "DataDude", that is Visual Studio
Team Suite for Database Professionals. I believe the price tag is hefty.

Many people use Red Gate's SQL Compare to generate their change scripts.

There is something called SQLFarms, which looks interesting, but I have
looked very very little on it.

> Can you also tell me how long typically takes for you
> to administer this type of change.

There are two steps: 1) Implement the change script. 2) Running it.
Implementing the change script takes quite some time. But I usually
implement a whole bunch of changes at a time. Our system is a product,
which runs at some 20 customer sites, and beside the production databases
there is an unknown number of test databases. How long time it takes
running the change script depends on the size of the data base. We are
lucky in that our customers are not 24/7 shops, but if a script needs
to run for 24 hours, this is permissible. Again, keep in mind that a
script includes several table changes. Typically I would not accept two
hours to reload 2.8 million rows.


--
Erland Sommarskog, SQL Server MVP, esquel@sommarskog.se

Books Online for SQL Server 2005 at
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/sql/2005/downloads/books.mspx
Books Online for SQL Server 2000 at
http://www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/previousversions/books.mspx

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