Headline: I will install GDR R2 and see if that is better than the current GDR.
GDR? R2? GDR stands for General Development Release and is the release of the database tools in Visual Studio. It started out life as “Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals”, usually referred to as DBPro for short. In October 2008 they combined the Developer and Database Professional editions and released a new version called GDR.
GDR – My Impressions
I really liked DBPro (the first capabilities). I could easily compare database schema and data and make two databases the same. NOW however, what used to take me 5 minutes took me over three hours! Why? They added LOTS of options in the compare. Here is a screen shot of those at the bottom of the list:
Notice the scroll bar! And see that thinkgs like the Filegroups are on by default!
Most of my work with DBPro has been to develop projects locally… (using a special project type called a Database Project… this allows me to actually check my Database information into source control)… I then deploy and test locally… And then use the Schema compare and Data compare to copy my information up to my hosting site. They will NOT let me change many of these items – nor should they. So this got me to thinking… I really like the concepts in “Framework Design Guidelines” by Brad Abrams. For example: Make your code easy to use for the most common scenarios. I can think of NO scenario except for backing up a database that I would use the default options. Even at VERY large companies, the drive letters for the databases are not identical between staging and production locations.
So… Before I spend too much time on a rant, I thought I’d download GDR R2 and see if it was any better.