Got Oracle? You Want to Read This!!!

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For the past 18 months, a few members of our team have been begging working to convince the data team at Microsoft to help support Oracle as a database schema provider for Visual Studio. 

I just got the COOLEST email in my inbox that I am happy to share!

Quest Software and the Visual Studio product team are proud to announce that Quest Software will release Toad® Extension for Visual Studio 2010, a database schema provider (DSP) for Oracle, for Visual Studio 2010. Toad Extension for Visual Studio gives Oracle developers the full benefits of Visual Studio 2010 Data Tools with their Oracle databases. Quest Software is a Launch Partner at the Visual Studio Launch event in Las Vegas.

In case you aren’t seeing why this is so huge, lemme ‘splain.  No, is too much, lemme sum up…

The Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR introduced a new product architecture that provides a model representation of a database schema and extensibility points to expand support for other database platforms.  Third parties can develop DSPs which implement models to expand the support for specific database platforms and versions.  Quest's Oracle DSP will add support to Team System Development for Oracle and will provide the following Oracle based database project features :

  • Offline Schema Development
  • Import Schema
  • Schema Compare
  • Data Generation and Unit Testing
  • Refactoring
  • and more...

[ via VSTS DB Team Blog]

To put all this in plain English… VSTSDB only enables SQL Server out of the box, and we didn’t have the ability to enable Oracle developers with the same set of rich tooling for things like version control of schemas, schema diffs, and unit tests.  By adding Toad® Extension for Visual Studio 2010, developers who are stuck with Oracle (instead of the awesomeness that is SQL Server) can at least have great tools for working in that environment.

Oh yeah… in case you want to know why SQL Server beats Oracle, see the SQL Server Compared to Oracle site, with information on how to migrate to SQL Server.