Software development products like Visual Studio have had built-in source control for over a decade. Even so source control is a feature that’s missing from the development tools that Microsoft supplies for SQL Server. However, in an enterprise environment source control for SQL Server and T-SQL development is every bit as important as source control for traditional software development projects.
Source control provides the organization with some vital features. First, at the project level, source control enables the organization to store and organize all of the database objects associated with each version of the database. From the developer and DBA perspective, source control enables team development by implementing a check-in and check-out procedure for all database code. This prevents multiple developers from working on the same piece of code at the same time and then inadvertently overwriting one another’s changes. In addition, source control can also provide and audit trail showing who has worked on each piece of code and when it was last modified. These types of features enable the businesses to produce higher quality code meeting end user expectations more efficiently.
