Sneak Peek at Team Edition for Database Professionals
Update: I am working on demos and walk-throughs of Team Edition for Database Professionals for VSTeamSystemCentral.com. (it's free - and relatively painless) for updates.
Thanks to Tom Murphy, a member of the team at Microsoft, I was able to get a sneak peek at the product earlier this week.
First impression: "Wow!" :)
This is something to behold. Two features immediately impress: Data Generators and Test Projects.
Test Projects provide database developers test-generation functionality very similar to that now enjoyed by C# and VB.Net developers using Team System. I got all giggly inside when Tom navigated to a stored procedure, right-clicked, selected Generate Test (or something close, I can't remember) - and SQL appeared that would test the procedure's output! Below this, a frame contained "assert" conditions and expected conditional results. Truly remarkable, truly awesome. Good job development team!
Data Generators provide a way to automatically populate a database with gibberish. "Well what good is gibberish, Andy?" I'm glad you asked. Gibberish, it turns out, is a highly prized commodity in the land of SOx. The good people who perform SOx audits will absolutely love you if you tell them developers and database developers do not work with anything related to "actual live and/or production data."
The Data Generator is part of a suite of functions which allows you to copy the schema of an existing database to your desktop, populate it, and test it - along with any changes you or others deem good and worthy. Part of this testing requires data. But using production data - including actual credit card numbers (even if they are encrypted) and other personal information - exposes that data to environments less-controlled than the production environment. Use the Data Generators to populate your local copy of the database with random unicode strings, or random data from pre-defined selections (you have to see this to believe it).
"How does a bunch of unrelated gibberish allow me to adequately test my database, Andy?" Again, I'm glad you asked. It's not unrelated! The Data Generators populate the database preserving referential and relational integrity. This sure beats those data scramblers I wrote back in the day. Again, hats off to the Microsoft developer team!
:{> Andy
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