There was a brand new release for November 2012. Those are interesting points, but still not enough for me to be happy about SSDT as the replacement for Data Dude.įrom the SSDT Home Page, I checked out the updates. It also allowed connectivity to SQL Azure, something that Data Dude could not pull off. It was an add on to any kind of SQL Server as well, that allowed DBA’s to have better control over their environment. Data Dude was my Visual Studio connection to SQL Server, SSDT would be that as well, but it was a lot more. I started to see that a direct comparison between SSDT and Data Dude was not quite fair. I started off by going to the SSDT Home Page to see what learning material and/or updates were available. I decided that I would give SSDT a try and see how the new world of DB development was going to feel. My thought at the time, how could Microsoft take such a huge step backwards? For a complete comparison of what is different between SSDT and Data Dude, see this blog from the SSDT team. I was horrified to find out features that I had thought were great in Data Dude were not available in SSDT! The loss of data generation plans and database unit testing were thee two that stood out for me as the biggest gaps. I immediately went out to find out what this change meant and what it would mean to me. It has been replaced by SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and the SQL Server Project type in Visual Studio.

Recently, we were introduced to Visual Studio 2012 and suddenly Data Dude is gone.

Database development was a first class citizen in my development world. I had a deployment story for my work that rivaled the deployments for my application code. I had near seamless access to source control through Visual Studio. Suddenly, with Data Dude my database development was a first class citizen.

For too long database development was delegated second class status – all of the work in the database stayed in the database, we had no proper versioning story, and deployments were awkward when compared to application deployments. When I first encountered Visual Studio 2008 Database Projects (or “Data Dude”), I was truly blown away.

Ssdt visual studio