James Anderson gives a basic overview of database projects within Visual Studio:
SSDT is a VS plugin that can script out a database into individual files so that you can us a VCS (I use Git) to version control them. Once those scripts are in my Git repo, I can use it as the single source of truth to generate my releases from. This is the basis of getting our databases into our CI process. ReadyRoll will be used to further improve this process and to add our migration/upgrade scripts to our repo. SSDT is required by ReadyRoll and can be found here.
Before we can start with ReadyRoll, we need to learn some Visual Studio basics.
I’ve used database projects for the better part of a decade. They aren’t perfect but in most environments, they’re quite helpful…if other people use them as well…