Backup and restore of a SQL Clone

What if you now do development work on a clone, but you to continue working on you own local clone while ‘disconnected’, such as when travelling? One simple option if the original database contains no private data, or the image has been masked, is to performance a normal backup and restore operations the clone, although you'll now be working with a normal, full-sized database. Read more

Automating database deployments to and from source control using SQL Compare and PowerShell

How to use SQL Compare Pro command line with PowerShell to automate the processes of getting a new database into source control, updating the source with the latest database changes, creating a new build script for a database version, and creating a deployment script to synchronize an existing database with source. Read more

Automatically keeping ‘hotfix’ and production database schemas in sync

How to use the SQL Compare Pro command line to automatically compare the schema of two versions of the same database, and then subsequently deploy to the target database any differences detected in the source database. Read more

How to use custom filters in SQL Compare

How to use filters in SQL Compare, when you don’t work with all the objects in a database. Read more

How to build-and-fill multiple development databases using PowerShell and SQL Data Generator

This article offers a build-and-fill method for development databases, where each developer will subsequently want to alter the data or metadata in his or her copy of the database. Read more

Creating database documentation in ePub format using SQL Doc and PowerShell

Phil Factor provides a PowerShell script that uses SQL Doc produce database documentation and then pandoc to publish it in ePub format. Read more

How to Automatically Fill your SQL Server Test Databases with Dummy Data

A PowerShell script to automatically populate a SQL Server database with dummy data, for database development and testing work. Read more

How to build multiple database versions from the same source: pre-deploy migration scripts

The final part of Alex Yates's three-part series tackles the complicated issue of automating deployments when the same table might have a different structure, in different production versions of the database. Read more