If you already have Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite installed, you can download and install Team Edition for Database Professionals in less than 10 minutes. Previously I had only seen the Database Professionals edition as a separate 3 gig download on MSDN that included all of Visual Studio along with it, so I never took the time to download it and install it since I already had the rest of the Team Suite installed.
Little did I know, Team Edition for Database Professionals can be installed as an add-on, so you don't have to waste your time re-downloading the rest of Visual Studio along with it. The add-on is a mere 7.9MB in size and will add all of the database features to your existing Team Suite installation.
The Database Professionals tools are excellent and I highly recommend them. Microsoft's brief description of the tools:
Tools for building SQL databases in a managed project environment with support for versioning, deployment, unit testing, refactoring, and off-line SQL development.
In addition it also lets you compare the schema or data of two different databases. A good use of this is to compare the schema/data that exists for databases in different environments (i.e. dev, test, production, etc.) The entire list of features is far too vast to include in this post . . . maybe another time.
Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals Add-on
Remember Me