SQL Server Team-based Development - Red Gate Software

Chapter 3: Change Management and
Source Control
With this chapter, we begin our exploration of the processes, tools and practices that are
required in order to allow a team, or even several teams, of developers to work together to
successfully and smoothly deliver an application and its database to production.
The purpose of change management is to protect the integrity of the database design
throughout the development process, to identify what changes have been made, when,
and by whom and, where necessary, to undo individual modifications. A source control
system is typically the critical application around which a change management regime is
structured, and this is a requirement for any team development project.
In this chapter, we will explore:
• development environments that are necessary, as an application and its database make
their way from initial development through to production
• an overview of source control for databases, including coverage of source control
models and systems, and the challenges of managing database objects in source control
• how to get your database objects into source control, via scripting or by using
Red Gate SQL Source Control
• managing data in source control, and how to synchronize the data needed for the
application to run (lookup tables, metadata, and so on).
With all this in place, we will move on, in Chapter 4, to see how to automate the
deployment of a database, including necessary data, from one environment to another.
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