Data Dude Comes to Live!

Welcome to the Data Dude blog.

For those of you who know a little of my past; my life has been directly connected to SQL Server since 1988. After being a member of the SQL Server development team for many years; it was time for a new adventure, which started July 1st 2005. While still being located in the Netherlands we started a new team that is part of Visual Studio Team System, coined “Data Dude”.

What the? Where does that name come from? Very simple, our senior vice president Eric Rudder needed a name to identify the long missing persona in the Visual Studio family. So finally after many moons the database developer is now an officially recognized persona in Visual Studio, to us the task to deliver the tooling to support the “Data Dude” inside Visual Studio. In July 2005 we slowly started building a team and investigating the needs and wants of the database developer. It soon became clear their was a lot of work to do done if there has been a class of developers who have been deprived from decent tool support we now found them. This forced us to focus on what our key scenario for v1.0 was going to be. If you go talk with a SQL Server DBA or database developer today; you will quickly learn they rely on a variety of tools; home grown; bought, open source etc. to do their work. But there was one recurring theme. Being asked what represents “the truth” when it comes to the schema objects they manage or work on the answer was mostly “the production database”. One of the bigger problems a lot of database professionals having been fighting with is getting a good grip on schema versioning and deployment.

Schema versioning and deployment is such a key piece of the database development life cycle, that the Data Dude made solving this problem his top priority.

Today we are announcing the first steps in to this direction, since we cannot ship a product named Data Dude, we needed a real name “Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals”, but you can just call me Data Dude. These are busy weeks since we will present our first public CTP at TechEd on June 11th in Boston. Yes you read this right, the Data Dude does practice Agile Development, and the results are there since we went from nothing to a real first CTP in 9 months; we started developer September 1st 2005 with 4 developers.

I hope to see you all at TechEd where we will all be present to show you our latest CTP, answer your questions and talk to you about your needs and wants. If you cannot make it, not to be worried the CTP will be publicly available.

For more information you can visit our website https://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx

See you soon,

Gert Drapers

Architect/Development Manager

Visual Studio Team Edition

for Database Professionals