Professional Microsoft® SQL Server® 2008 Administration

10.1. Creating Projects

Visual Studio projects are generally a foreign concept to DBAs because the idea originated in the programming world. Using the hierarchy of Visual Studio, you create a solution, which can contain many projects, which can contain many files for the project. For example, you may have a solution called LoanApplication that contains two projects: one for your C# program and another for the DDL to create the database. In the business intelligence world, these solutions help you group all the related files, such as SSRS reports, SSAS cubes, and the SSIS packages to load the data.

Inside Management Studio, you can also create projects to hold your scripts and connections for easy access. When you double-click a script, it automatically implements the connection associated with the script. By placing script files in a project, you also can store files easily in Source Safe. This enables you to check code in and out, allowing for a collaborative development environment wherein only one DBA can be editing the code at one time. We'll discuss this requirement later in this chapter, but version controlling your scripts is often a requirement for change management. You could also check all of your administrative scripts into Source Safe and share them with other administrators.

To create a project in Management Studio, select File New Project, and then select SQL Server ...