Who is the database professional?

Another great question J There are several ways to answer that. In the broadest sense, the database professional is any professional who directly interacts with the database, ranging from the data architect, to the database developer, to the database administrator, to the IT operations engineer, to the business analyst.

However, a probably more useful perspective on this issue is what roles is Team Edition for Database Professionals specifically targeted at in our upcoming release?

The main goal of this upcoming release is to support an iterative database development lifecycle through efficient management of database schema changes.

So clearly the database developer role is specifically targeted by this tool. On a day-to-day basis, a db dev performing this role is often responsible for building tables, views, stored procedures, and other schema objects. Not only will the developer be authoring these objects, but testing and refactoring them as well. All of this development work is efficiently managed and supported through the database projects one can create with Team Data. Of course in no organization does a database developer work alone. Team Data supports the team environment through version control management of schema objects and integration with the collaborations tools of Team Foundation Server.

Another very important role targeted by this toolset is the database administrator. What is a database without a deployed instance? It is the task of the database administrator to make this happen. He will deploy changes to the database. When doing this, he will carefully want to analyze the changes he is about to make to the database. He will also want the ability to leverage the history of changes so he can go back to previous versions of the database if need be. These tasks are also supported by the toolset.

The caveat to always make around roles is that a role does not equate to a specific person, job, or title in your organization. Oftentimes a single person wears multiple “hats”. Sometimes you find that the person titled the DBA is really the db dev for that organization. Whatever your organizational structure is, I’m sure you can relate to the tasks each of these roles performs and I hope you can appreciate how this toolset will help those performing those tasks immensely.

And of course our ambitions on the product team are large. Expect that as we expand the product we will target more and more of the broader sense of the term database professional.

Sachin Rekhi