MSFT has announced plans to upgrade the .NET framework to 4.0 on the next major release, and in the same communiqué quietly slipped in some interesting news. The features previously relegated to the Visual Studio Database Professional SKU will be moved into other SKUs in the 2010 release of Visual Studio.
This is an interesting move. Certainly the features in Data Dude have always been super cool. Who doesn’t think massive DB compares, stored proc. unit tests, sample data generation, and database entity management as code files are sweet? Now everyone gets the love.
In a way, I am disappointed. I have always thought the Data Dude was a potential game changer. Targeting database developers as developers instead of DBAs is a fundamental change in the way these folks can manage their work and the expectations others have of them. Treating DBAs as developers holds the promise of increasing the data development role into one of respectability, and could serve to boost the overall profession of the traditional DBA.
Farewell, Data Dude. I liked thee.
On the other hand, simplifying the Visual Studio SKU set can not be a bad thing. Buying Team System and determining licensing can be harder to figure out than buying a house. And putting the Data Dude features into the hands of developers via the Visual Studio Development SKU is a nice trade.
I do give the database version of Visual Studio credit for finally bringing database development, testing, source control, and deployment in line with the application code. Having built and maintained a similar system for Oracle recently, I appreciate the effort it takes.
This change brings Visual Studio in line with the reality of today’s developers. DBAs, where you can still find them, are primarily systems administrators now, and only get involved in development when the SQL is particularly complex or poorly performing. The rest of the time, the previously application-only developers are writing everything from the database through the middle tier to the front-end. It’ll be good for us to have a richer set of tools without having to justify additional license tiers.