2009-07-13

Visual studio net database edition does not handle data

The title is not totally correct; it does handle data. But it cannot do version management on your database if you have data in it properly.

Like this:
A year into the project you/the customer realize that a Customer can be split into InternalCustomer and ExternalCustomer and a decision is made to make Customer the base class and the other two children.  An accordingly correct decision is made to create two new tables in the database and have them have their corresponding fields.

Technically, or database script wise, this means
1) create two new tables
2) select data from the Customer table into the two child tables <- oops
3) drop some fields in the Customer table

Visual studio database edition can handle 1) and 3) but there is no way to tell it to run a custom script in between.

This unfortunately makes the product useless for me.

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