Day: May 20, 2026

Andy Brownsword creates a reference:

Large data solutions can span multiple databases. I’ve recently shared how amazing Database Projects can be but objects which reference across database boundaries can throw up warnings. Is the code solid or have you picked the wrong table and column combination? – you won’t know, and the code is fragile.

This is where References come into play. They make our projects aware of other databases so objects can reference them without unnecessary warnings. Plus intellisense is a nice bonus.

There are a few ways to handle these dependencies depending on how your projects are organised and what tooling you’re using, so let’s jump into the problem and check out the different options.

This was, without a doubt, one of the most painful things around working with database projects in Visual Studio. Not only do you need to keep up with your own database, but also the databases you reference. In addition, if the databases you reference happen to reference your database, you’ll end up with circular dependencies that will fail. The “best” solution was to create a stripped-down version of one of the databases that doesn’t include references, and then use that to jump-start the second database, and then use that to create the full version of the original database. So now you’re maintaining three separate database projects (at a minimum—this assumes you have one pair of databases with cross-referenced dependencies). Heaven help you if you have a cross-referencing love triangle.