VSTS has always been about creating a tool to support the individual roles of a software development project. Today,VSTS supports features for Architects, Developers and Testers. Today, Microsoft announced the additon of another team role to the VSTS product lineup – Database Professional.

With the Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals, DBA’s and database developers can now enjoy the benfits of what Visual Studio Team System and Team Foundation Server bring to Application Lifecycle Mangement. Attendees of this year’s TechEd conference in Boston will be able to get there hands on a copy of the CTP with download availability following shortly thereafter. Here’s a clipping of some of the features included:

• The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice
  
• Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change
  
• A New T-SQL editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans
  
• SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and a database) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync
  
• DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync
  
• The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to create database unit tests using T-SQL or managed code
  
• DataGenerator lets you create data generation plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based upon your existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior to running unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

Many customers ask me what’s a best practice for moving schemea changes through the application promotion model. I can’t wait to see how the Database Professional edition can help faciliate this complicated process. Sounds like a whitepaper in the making.