VS 2012 Data Tier App Project Updating Database Best Practice

Question

IN VS2012, I creates a database project, an imported a Data Tier Application .dacpac I had created from my SQL Server 2012 instance.

My question is if I am developing, and all I want to do is modify the sql table structure in VS 2012, say I add a new column to a table, is the only way to transfer that change to the database to build out the project .dacpac and then upgrade the database, in my case through SQL Server Management Studio. If I am working on a developer database, non production and I just want an update script I don't see how to get that in db project for data tier app.

I have been just manually making the change in both places, but eventually I will get interrupted and forget to make the changes accordingly.

How do you do it?

thanks

NOTE: VS2012 is NOT grabbing my changes. Open a database View Query and click "Update" data base, it is not adding my table edits in VS2012 tot he script. If you view the video here [link](http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/gert-drapers-demonstrates-sql-server-data-tools/1r7u8u0qb) and jump to the 11 minute mark you see Gert is getting an update script of all his edits, but mine does not, why? — JAMES, Mar 04 '13 at 22:50

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 30 '13 at 00:29

Maybe I'm not following you here but have you tried making the updates by Publishing the database project? If you right click on the database project you should see the Publish Database dialog. From there you set your Target database connection and then click the Publish button. This should apply your changes, in this case your added column, to your target database.

You can also run it from the command line. That would look something like this

c:\MyCode\bin\Debug>"c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SQL Server\110\DAC\bin"\sqlpackage.exe /Action:Publish /Sourcefile:MyCode.dacpac /Profile:local.publish.xml

And the publish.xml file might look something like this

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <IncludeCompositeObjects>True</IncludeCompositeObjects>
    <TargetDatabaseName>TargetDatabaseName</TargetDatabaseName>
    <DeployScriptFileName>TheDeployScriptName.sql</DeployScriptFileName>
    <TargetConnectionString>Data Source=localhost\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=True;Pooling=False</TargetConnectionString>
    <ProfileVersionNumber>1</ProfileVersionNumber>
  </PropertyGroup>
</Project>

VS 2012 Data Tier App Project Updating Database Best Practice

1 Answers1