Friday, March 02, 2007

Still using Data Dude... Still not "Wow'd"

I'm forcing myself to use VSTEDP for my current project, which involves making a wide variety of changes to an existing database schema in order to support new functionality required by my web application.  Hopefully, I'll have a seemless deployment of the changes into production when the time comes (holding breath).  I mean, that is one of the advertised benefits...

What I like is visibility into any breaking changes.  "Data Dude" does all of the dependency checking for me, and will create errors in the Visual Studio task list if a change breaks other objects.

What I dislike is how painful it is to actually make the changes using VSTEDP itself. 

Come on, guys.  Visual Studio is known for being more than just a text editor.  Microsoft is known for providing great GUI database tools in addition to just "Query Analyzer" functionality.  IMHO, you shouldn't have released "Data Dude" without the same level of database editing support that Visual Studio itself supports against live databases. 

Am I just using the product incorrectly, or coming into it with way too much expectation? 

The only solution that I found was that I could make changes to a live (development) database and then use the schema compare functionality in order to capture the deltas.  This seems to work, and allows me to use tools that I'm already familiary with.  I would just have preferred to do everything against my "one version of the truth" right in the tool itself.  Not to mention that if I were actually in a "team" environment, then this solution does not provide a very solid way to prevent people's changes from stepping on each other.