As developers, we are accustomed to using Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) in our software projects. Visual Studio has been a major player in the IDE space for many years, if not decades, and it has allowed developers to use the latest software development processes to further improve quality and efficiency in software projects. Server management, on the other hand, has generally been a second-class citizen for many products in the past. In general, this fact can be understood, if not agreed with. IDEs are tools that design and create software that can generate revenue for a business, whereas management tools generally only offer the benefit of some sort of cost saving, rather than direct revenue generation.
The SQL Server Tools of the past (pre-SQL 2005) were very much focused on fulfilling the requirements of being able to manage and query SQL Server instances and databases, but received no great investments in making the tools comfortable or even enjoyable to use. Advanced IDEs were firmly in the application development domain and application developers know that databases are a storage system at best and therefore require no elegant tooling to be worked with.
Luckily for us, the advent of SQL Server 2005, along with the release of the .NET Framework, encouraged some people at Microsoft to invest a little more time and resources in providing an improved interface for both developers and DBAs for database and data management purposes. The SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) was born and unified the functionality of two legacy tools: Query Analyzer and Enterprise Manager. Anyone who has worked with SQL Server since the 2005 release will recognize the application regardless of whether they are using the 2005 release or the latest 2016 build.
There have been several different names and releases of the second tool in this chapter, SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT), going back to SQL Server 2005/2008 where the tool was known under the name Visual Studio Database Projects (that is, Data Dude). The many incarnations of this tool since SQL Server 2005 have been focused on the development of database projects. The SSDT has many of the tools and interfaces known to Visual Studio users and allows a seasoned Visual Studio user to quickly familiarize themselves with the tool. Particularly interesting is the improved ability to integrate database and business intelligence projects into source control and continuous integration and automated deployment processes.
In this chapter, we will be exploring:
- Installing and updating SQL Server Tools
- New SSMS features and enhancements
- SQL Server Data Tools
- Tools for developing R and Python code