Managing Database Projects

If you're managing enterprise databases in Microsoft^® Visual InterDev™, database projects give you a big advantage: complete control over your database, its structure, and its data. Database projects make this possible through SQL scripts, files that you can use to build the database and populate it with data. These files and the folders that contain them in the database project can be put under source control for even greater control.

When you create a database project and add a data connection, the database is displayed in the Data View window, and you can manipulate the objects in the database using the Microsoft® Visual Database Tools (the Database Designer and Query Designer).

You can use the same data connection in a Web project and a database project. This allows you to maintain control over databases whose data you want to display on Web pages.

Using database projects in addition to Web projects gives you the following benefits:

• Data connections aren't required in a database project until you want to run a SQL script against a database. In addition, you can rename data connections in a database project.
  
  
• You can use source control to ensure that the database and its structure are under the administrator's control.
  
  
• You can easily deploy the database to other projects.