In my job I get to talk to a lot of developers about their tools they use – and many of them use some variant of Visual Studio (which isn’t surprising considering my job).  However, what does surprise me is the number of teams that I speak to that are not using the Database Edition of Team System.  There are some very powerful tools in the box that can really help out the DBA (or the developer that becomes the default DBA on many projects).  If you are using Visual Studio and do any database work, these are tools you should know about.

You may not realize it, but recently Microsoft made some changes to the licensing and now when you buy Team System Developer Edition, you also get Database Edition included (definitely an acknowledgement to the developer that is also the DBA). 

My team has recognized that there are many people who could benefit from understanding more about this functionality and has an event to help with this that they are running in Denver, Phoenix, LA, Irvine, and San Diego.  If you are already using Team System Database Edition today, you probably won’t get a ton out of this session, but if you are using Visual Studio Professional or Standard and do a lot with databases, you may want to check it out.  I know that it costs more, but if you can automate and avoid change control problems on a lot of your database tasks it may just pay for itself quite rapidly. 

For more information check out Steven Lange’s post on the event.