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Category: SQL Server Data Tools

Creating a SQL Server Data Tools Project Template from a Database Project

Published 2024-08-16 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt builds a template:

Since I was introducing Unit Testing for databases at work, and we have multiple Database Projects, I wanted to do the initial work once and reuse it in my different Database Unit Testing Projects.

To create an SSDT template based on an existing Database Project, you first open the Database Project in Visual Studio. As soon as your Database Project is loaded, navigate to the Project section in the menu bar at the top left. Choose Export Template to continue.

Click through to see how you can put together a database project template that you could re-use in future projects.

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Writing Check Constraints in SQL Sever Data Tools

Published 2021-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Johnson has a how-to guide:

That all looks ok, and everything published fine, and kept on publishing fine until I happened to check the generated script for some of the publishes (I was in the early stages of development at this point so deployments were just being done through Visual Studio direct to my machine).

When I did I noticed that every deployment I was getting code like this:

That’s dropping all my constraints, recreating them using WITH NOCHECK, and then using WITH CHECK to check the existing data. Obviously all the data will pass those checks, but that’s going to add some time to my deployments, and as the size of the data and the number of checks both increase, these checks will take more and more time.

Read on to understand what’s happening. I’d call this a fairly silly limitation on the part of SSDT.

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Generating SQL Server Data Tools Solutions from Templates

Published 2020-06-04 by Kevin Feasel

Sander Stad walks us through creating a template for building SSDT solutions:

Yes, templates. But how are we’re going to create a template for an SSDT solution in such a way that it can be reused?

That’s where the PowerShell module called “PSModuleDevelopment” comes in. PSModuleDevelopment is part of the PSFramework PowerShell module.

The PSModuleDevelopment module enables you to create templates for files but also entire directories. Using placeholders you can replace values in the template making is possible to have the name and other variables set.

This is where the SSDT template comes in. I have created a template for SSDT that containes two projects. One project is meant for the data model and the other project is meant for the unit tests.

Read the whole thing and check out Sander’s GitHub repo.

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Generating Entity Framework Core Classes from a Database Project

Published 2020-04-20 by Kevin Feasel

Erik Ejlskov Jensen walks us through generating Entity Framework classes from a Visual Studio database project and from a .dacpac file:

EF Core Power Tools adds the ability to generate code directly from a Database project, without having to publish to a live database first, and having a SQL Server database engine running locally. It can also generate code from live SQL Server, Azure SQL DB, MySQL, Postgres and SQLite database. It has a large number of customization options – pluralization, renaming, file and name space choices and more, which is not available via the EF Core commands. And you do not have to install any design time libraries in your own project.

Read on for a demo of that as well as a dacpac reverse engineering tool.

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Platform Compatibility and SSDT

Published 2019-01-28 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott walks us through platform compatibility in SQL Server Data Tools:

Sometimes you don’t have the perfect development environment for SQL Server, sometimes you deploy to things like SQL Azure and want to test locally, for various reasons it is possible that you want to deploy to one version of SQL Server but set the project properties to a different version of SQL Server. If you find yourself in this situation you might need to use the parameter AllowIncompatiblePlatform
 which essentially says “I know I said the project is for SQL 2017 but I am deploying to SQL 2014”, anytime you say this you also sign the contract that says “If I am deploying to a lower version then I have made sure I haven’t used any keywords or object types that didn’t exist in that version and also if everything fails then so be it, I live with my choices every day”.

The story is a little complicated, but Ed straightens it out for us.

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Database Projects: Helping Find Obsolete References

Published 2017-11-15 by Kevin Feasel

Jan Mulkens explains some of those “unresolved reference” warnings in SQL Server Data Tools database projects:

if you’re developing databases in SSDT, like you should, you’re probably getting a lot of build warnings.
One of the warnings you’ll see the most often is the “unresolved reference”.
Usually you solve these by adding either the master, the msdb or some application database as a database reference.
This post is about a warning you might get when out of habit (or, if like me, you didn’t know any better yet) you’re using old system views like sys.sysprocesses. You expect it to work but it simply doesn’t…

Worth reading the whole thing, as well as keeping up-to-date with your DMV and system view usage.

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CI With SQL Server And Jenkins

Published 2017-04-26 by Kevin Feasel

Chris Adkin shows how to auto-deploy SQL Server Data Tools projects to a SQL Server instance using Jenkins:

The aim of this blog post is twofold, it is to explain how:

  • A “Self building pipeline” for the deployment of a SQL Server Data Tools project can be implemented using open source tools
  • A build pipeline can be augmented using PowerShell

What You Will Need

  • Jenkins automation server

  • cURL

  • SQL Server 2016 (any edition will suffice)

  • Visual Studio 2015 community edition

  • A windows server, physical or virtual to install all of the above on, I will be using Windows Server 2012 R2 as the operating system

Automated integration via CI is extremely helpful, and Chris makes it look easy in this post.

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Continuous Deployment In A Box

Published 2017-03-09 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has been working on a very interesting project:

What does this do?

Unblock-File *.ps1 – removes a flag that windows puts on files to stop them being run if they have been downloaded over the internet.
.\ContinuousDeploymentFTW.ps1 – runs the install script which actually:

  • Downloads chocolatey
  • Installs git
  • Installs Jenkins 2
  • Guides you how to configure Jenkins
  • Creates a local git repo
  • Creates a SSDT project which is configured with a test project and ssdt and all the references that normally cause people problems
  • Creates a local Jenkins build which monitors your local git repo for changes
  • When code is checked into the repo, the Jenkins job jumps into action and…

If you check into the default branch “master” then Jenkins:

  • Builds the SSDT project
  • Deploys the project to the unit test database
  • Runs the tSQLt unit tests
  • Generates a deployment script for the “production” database

and what you have there is continuous delivery in a box

Click through for a video where Ed shows how it all works.

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How SSDT Publication Works

Published 2017-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Ed Elliott has a great post deconstructing the SQL Server Data Tools deployment process:

The first thing to note is the garbage collection, there are like 8 changes to the line so 8 sets of garbage collection that happen which is expensive for a .net app. We get much more processor usage for a more prolonged time and we really start to see some disk activity, write activity just has one peak while the files are written but reading stays quite high throughout the whole process. It could be that it is sql reading from disk (my demo was from a single ssd with a local sql instance) but we can see after the sql cpu settles down the green disk read line stays high so it is unlikely to be pure sqlserver.exe.

What does this tell us?

Well if you have large objects, multi-thousand line stored procs then you better get yourself some serious ssd’s to deploy from. If you have smaller objects then you’ll need CPU and memory – don’t scrimp here!

Check it out.

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