You can use this approach:
- Put your reference data into XML files, one per table
- Add XML files with reference data to your database project
- Use a Post-Deployment script to extract the data from XML and merge it into your tables
Here is a more detailed description of each step, illustrated with an example. Let's say that you need to initialize a table of countries that has this structure:
create table Country (
CountryId uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
CountryCode varchar(2) NOT NULL,
CountryName varchar(254) NOT NULL
)
Create a new folder called ReferenceData under your database project. It should be a sibling folder of the Schema Objects and Scripts.
Add a new XML file called Country.xml to the ReferenceData folder. Populate the file as follows:
<countries>
<country CountryCode="CA" CountryName="Canada"/>
<country CountryCode="MX" CountryName="Mexico"/>
<country CountryCode="US" CountryName="United States of America"/>
</countries>
Find Script.PostDeployment.sql, and add the following code to it:
DECLARE @h_Country int
DECLARE @xmlCountry xml = N'
:r ..\..\ReferenceData\Country.xml
'
EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @h_Country OUTPUT, @xmlCountry
MERGE Country AS target USING (
SELECT c.CountryCode, c.CountryName
FROM OPENXML(@h_Country, '/countries/country', 1)
WITH (CountryCode varchar(2), CountryName varchar(254)) as c) AS source (CountryCode, CountryName)
ON (source.CountryCode = target.CountryCode)
WHEN MATCHED THEN
UPDATE SET CountryName = source.CountryName
WHEN NOT MATCHED BY TARGET THEN
INSERT (CountryId, CountryCode, CountryName) values (newid(), source.CountryCode, source.CountryName)
;
I tried this solution only in VS 2008, but it should be agnostic to your development environment.
