Database Projects - Modern Approach in Database Development
Contents
Database projects in brief
Database projects have significantly improved database development, giving developers
a number of great opportunities.
A database project is an offline representation of a database schema with extended
opportunities for offline schema development. It is a collection of logically organized
SQL scripts and query files, which are used both to create a new database and update
the existing one.
Database development is clear and logical within a database project. It takes you
to do the following:
1. Create a database project guided by the wizard, either empty or with database
objects imported from a required database.
2. Manage SQL scripts and query files in the project and edit their contents.
3. Build the ready project to create a script that will deploy all the project
changes to the database on the server.
4. Deploy either the entire project or only required changes to the server.
This article describes how you can use database projects, provided in dbForge Studio for MySQL and dbForge Fusion for MySQL,
and benefit from them. We will use a project based on a sample database Sakila to
illustrate project handling.
Benefits of database projects
We recommend using database projects as they fully meet modern database development
standards. Projects allow using version control system for database team development,
which is critical for efficient development.
As much work in database development accounts for working with SQL scripts, database
projects offer a great number of features for quick and convenient SQL editing.
You will appreciate automatic syntax check in SQL scripts, check of schema objects
references in all statements, check of any object duplicates, etc.
You can leverage more features while working with objects. One of them is refactoring,
a form of editing aimed at improving readability while preserving meaning.
You can
use the refactoring option to accurately rename
tables, views, columns of
tables and views, aliases, stored routines, local variables, triggers, events, and
users. Statements that reference a renamed object will be automatically updated
in all the project scripts. Text strings and comments, containing the object's name,
will be updated too.
Settings and syntax differences in various versions of SQL servers can put obstacles
in the phase of deploying the ready tested database to the server.
Projects can have
multiple configurations, they allow you to customize the database project
for deploying to various versions of SQL server. You should select the required
connection and settings in a project configuration once, and next time just use
the required configuration.