Continuous Deployments for SQL Server – Part 2

If you’re using SQL server at work and manually deploying changes to your database using manually crafted scripts then its time to stop, there is a better way to do this by automating it, remove the chance of human error, this will also ensure that before you deploy to production that your changes will work, guaranteed.

In this blog post, I’ll discuss comparing two SQL Server databases which you can use SQL compare to funnily enough compare them and see the differences between the two, very quickly and reliably, imagine you wanted to compare your local Development database with say your Staging database for example, or compare UAT to Production.

In this blog post I’ll go over the steps I went through and how to use Sql Compare to work out what’s changed between the two databases, schema wise, then in the second part I will show you how to use SQL Data Compare. to compare the data within both databases and in part 3 I will either create a script to update the database or run an exe which the tools will create for us to make both databases the exact same, both in schema and in data, so let’s get started.

I’ve made dome schema changes to STOCK_DB_DESIGN and I wish to see whats changed, so lets see how to compare the 2 databases using SQL Compare (I’m using version 11).

In the screen shot above I’ve chosen my databases to compare and the tool will now run and show me what the schema differences between the two. the screen shot below shows the results after the tool has been ran against both databases.

On the left pane we see the changed database, on the right the database without these changes, I clicked on the first row to show the changes in the t_depot table and in the split at the bottom it shows the differences per object – very quick and easy to see what’s changed.

Update time
In order to update the older database with the new changes, we simply click on Deployment Wizard at the top and we get the following screen with options:-

Here we get 2 options:-

• Create a deployment script – use this option if you want to script the changes and review before running in the changes.
• Deploy Using SQL Compare – use this option if you want the tool to make the changes for you, you also get the option after its ran to automatically compare the 2 database after the changes to verify.

And that is it, easy, simple and straightforward, no manual steps involving creating scripts, no real chance for it to go wrong, plus you can source control the script if you really wanted to or share it with colleagues.

In part 3 I’ll cover comparing the 2 databases when it comes to data, for this we will use SQL Data Compare.