Case study from Corrin Lakeland

SQL Source Control – It's SQL Compare on steroids.

Pity Corrin Lakeland, DBA with electronic payments company Snapper.

Sole custodian of his company's data, he used to go through every database update by hand, gathering changes from developers one-by-one and scrutinising them for errors. That was before SQL Source Control.

Concerned about his system's integrity, Lakeland began searching for a way to add it to Subversion, Snapper's source control system. SQL Source Control was the ideal solution.

When I joined Snapper, the data warehouse documentation didn't match production. Because I didn't know what code had transformed the system, I wasn't confident in its performance. SQL Source Control has given me that confidence.

I spot every single change during development. Hand on heart, I can say I trust the data. And all those times I had to reject a developer's changes because they forgot to include an index? That sort of thing just can't happen anymore.

Error-checking wasn't the only problem. Development happened on the test server, and migration was awkward. Updates were pushed only at major milestones. Now SQL Source Control does the hard work.

It takes the pain out of updates. I develop on a clean system, certain I can migrate changes to testing afterwards. I don't worry that the right code isn't going into production, either. Nobody can make a change without me noticing - it's SQL Compare on steroids.

As we use Subversion already, the developers just work as normal. They have noticed I'm catching more bugs and checking their work more effectively, though!