Multi-Environment Deployments Using Team Edition for Database Professionals - SQL Server Central

Multi-Environment Deployments Using Team Edition for Database Professionals - SQL Server Central: "Microsoft's introduction of the Team Edition for Database Professionals (VSDB) turned around our development and deployment processes. For a long time we had been working on methods of deploying from source control in the same way that the development teams work with their code. We tried several tools from various vendors and had finally decided to build our own. We had been using the home grown tool for a little while when VSDB came out. It solved a number of problems that we had run into with our in-house tool and offered a bunch of functionality that we had previously not had. So we went with VSDB. Now, almost all of our major development projects are using VSDB for development and deployment. The road to implementation contained more than a few bumps."The road to implementation contained more than a few bumps. The biggest of these was figuring out how exactly to set up our projects so that we could automate deployment between multiple environments; Development, QA, Staging, Training, Performance Testing and, finally, Production.
There are any number of possible differences between environments. The two that created difficulties for us were the different disks defined on different servers, and the different security requirements between servers. We also needed the builds to be automated so that we can schedule when they're run as well as run them manually. Finally we needed to be able to share projects between different DBA's so that more than one of use could run the same deployment on more than one environment.
In the following, I'm assuming you already create your VSDB projects and understand the basics of working within the Visual Studio environment as well as the basics of working with VSDB. We're also going to concentrate on scenarios where we're recreating the database every deployment. Incremental deployments have a whole host of issues that may require another article. This is targeted at the Visual Studio 2005 version. A new version has come out with Visual Studio 2008, but according to Gert Drapers blog, there are probably few differences between what's outlined here and the new version.