Rob Farley hates hearing that stored procedures don’t need to go into source control:
Hearing this is one of those things that really bugs me.
And it’s not actually about stored procedures, it’s about the mindset that sits there.
I hear this sentiment in environments where there are multiple developers. Where they’re using source control for all their application code. Because, you know, they want to make sure they have a history of changes, and they want to make sure two developers don’t change the same piece of code, maybe they even want to automate builds, all those good things.
But checking out code and needing it to pass all those tests is a pain. So if there’s some logic that can be put in a stored procedure, then that logic can be maintained outside the annoying rigmarole of source control. I guess this is appealing because developers are supposed to be creative types, and should fight against the repression, fight against ‘the man’, fight against control.
When I come across this mindset, I worry a lot.
Read on for Rob’s set of worries, and hie thee to the source control repository. It really doesn’t matter which source control product you use (ideally, the same one that developers use for their app code), just as long as it’s in source control.