2011-07-06 14:26:09

SQL Source Control

If I weren't such a lousy student maybe I would get a masters degree in business.  My graduate thesis would be entitled, "The 21 Questions that People Ask at Trade Shows".  You see, I have noticed that all the visitors to our booths at TechEd and PDC and DevConnections always ask the same questions.

• Why should I switch to Vault?
• How much does it cost?
• Does it integrate with Visual Studio?

After going to enough trade shows, we've basically heard them all.  Nobody ever asks anything new.

Except for that time some guy with a Unix beard wanted to know if we were hiring and do we do criminal background checks and how many felony convictions are considered acceptable for a new hire.  That was ... different.

Anyway, one of the questions we hear at every show is:

Can I use Vault to version control my SQL stuff?

To which we reply:

Well, no.  You see, we could do this feature, but it would require us to build a whole bunch of SQL-specific tooling and that would put us in competition with Red Gate and we don't want to be there because Red Gate is a great company and Neil Davidson and Simon Galbraith are great guys so it would just be easier if you went over to the Red Gate booth and asked them to do this and let them know that we'll be available to help and by the way would you care for one of our free T-shirts?

I am quite pleased to say that, thanks to Red Gate's efforts, we won't have to give this answer anymore.  Earlier this year, they shipped SQL Source Control 2.1 which includes integration support for Vault (and apparently every other prevalent version control tool on the planet).

It is miserable in the extreme for a developer to be working without good support for version control.  If you're doing SQL development, this is the product you want to use.  My compliments to our friends at Red Gate for meeting this need.