Something that was announced last week without a great deal of hype was ‘Data Dude’. Data Dude aka Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals is a VSTS version designed specifically for Database Developers. This announcement was very timely as I was conducting a workshop with a team of database developers and one of the topics was ‘database development methodologies’. One of the things that came up in the workshop was how to unit test database development just like the Visual Basic developers do. Well Data Dude will assist with creating unit tests and also allow you to easily generate sample data that is statistically ‘real’. Some of the other highlights in Data Dude are data comparisons as well as schema comparisons, so you no longer need to use windiff to compare create scripts. Another highlight is refeactoring which allows you to rename an object and have all references to that object automatically updated. A CTP for data dude will be available for download on the 11th of June. For more details refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro.
