So how do we manage permissions in a Database Project?  Well the logins and users are pretty straight forward, however sadly the grants are not as intuitive as we’d like (unless you find manually editing xml documents intuitive), but the next version is supposed to be gui driven.  However right now I hope you enjoy editing xml.

So first we take the Server project and create the login for the user (if don’t know the difference between Logins and Users go read K. Brian Kelley’s post here, I’ll wait).  If you are in Schema view (and if not, why not?) make sure to go under Server Level Objects –> Security –> Logins, not the Security –> Users path, as you want a Server Login, not a master db User.

You’ll also notice in the Add new item dialog that there is a different template for each:

• Login (Windows Auth)
• Login (Sql Server)

At this point you might also be tempted in creation of the login to assign a default database, avoid that temptation.  When you assign a default database, that user database must already exist, however when you deploy the server project (i.e., the master database) there’s a good chance the user database won’t exist yet, I promise we’ll take care of it later though.

CREATE LOGIN TestLogin WITH PASSWORD = 'P@ssw0rd1'

So now that you have a server login in the server project we need to create a database user (remember to reference the server project in the database project).  This time you can go under the Security –> Users path.

CREATE USER [TestUser]
    FOR LOGIN [TestLogin]
    WITH DEFAULT_SCHEMA = dbo;

Now we have a login and a user created, lastly we set the default database in the database project post-Deployment script:

ALTER LOGIN [TestLogin] WITH DEFAULT_DATABASE=[$(DatabaseName)]

As you see I’m using the variable of the database name since I can change the database name for each deployment:

Taking a look at pertinent parts of the deployment sql scripts we have (remember this is in SQLCMD mode):

/*
Deployment script for master -LocalServer.sql
*/
:setvar DatabaseName "master"
GO
USE [$(DatabaseName)]
GO
PRINT N'Creating TestLogin...';
GO
CREATE LOGIN [TestLogin]
    WITH PASSWORD = N'P@ssw0rd1', DEFAULT_DATABASE = master;
GO
------------------------------
/*
Deployment script for AdventureWorks - AdventureWorks.sql
*/
:setvar DatabaseName "AdventureWorks"
GO
CREATE USER [TestUser] FOR LOGIN [TestLogin];
GO
ALTER LOGIN [TestLogin] WITH DEFAULT_DATABASE=[$(DatabaseName)]
GO

Lately I’ve been utilizing schemas more frequently in my databases, however the first time I did this in VSDBPro was a pain.  The reason for this was I didn’t know how to do it, so hopefully this post will save someone else the struggles I went through.

First I want to highlight the differences between Solution Explorer and Schema View.  Solution Explorer is the physical file structure, it doesn’t know about relationships other than the folder structure:

Then there is the schema view which does understand the relationships within the database and models very closely the Management Studio layout:

As you would imagine there are pros and cons to both.  For example if you have invalid syntax for defining a table, you won’t even see it in schema view, you’ll only see it in solution explorer.  However if you have a foreign key relationship that points to a missing column you’ll see it in schema view with the warning symbol.  Also the schema view has appropriate icons for different object types.

However back to the issue of schema management.  I’m very particular about naming conventions and file placement so not trusting the tool (sorry Gert) I figured I new better and would just go into solution explorer and create the new schema myself.  No problem:

And then I tried to create objects under that scheme however the folder structure wasn’t there!!  What a pain, so I went out to Windows Explorer copied the file structure from an existing schema, removing all the objects and added them into the project via Solution explorer, all the time wondering about the person who thought this was a good idea.

However lo and behold had I just switched over to schema view which understands what a schema is and what it can have, I would have been fine.

What’s more is that when I created my first table, it automatically not only created the table sql file, it created the entire folder structure, seen below back in solution explorer:

So while we’re all used to utilizing Solution Explorer for our projects, for Database projects please be aware and use Schema view unless you have to deal with the actual files themselves.

So I’ve been using Visual Studio for Database Professionals (aka VSDBPro, aka DataDude) consistently this year for primarily new database development, both for Data Warehouses and OLTP Databases.  This will be the first in what hopefully will become a series of posts about Database projects.

In Database Professional there is are two types of projects, the database project and the database server project.  The database project would be the user database while the database server project would be the master database.  Neither one is specific to a particular server or instance, it’s a Visual Studio project which can be deployed on a single or multiple instances as you need.

You can also create dependencies between projects so you can have a database project which had a dependency on a database server project.  Why would you do this you ask?  The most straight forward example would be the login to user relationship.  You could have a database server project which creates your logins, and a database project which then creates the users in that user database mapped back to the logins in the server project.

You can reference a database project one of three ways:

1. Project within the solution
2. .schema file (DB projects don’t create .dll files)
3. Server and database variables

The first two are pretty straight forward as you would just select a project or a .schema from your workspace, so let’s look at how you would utilize variables for reference.  First here’s the screen to create a dependency:

Easy enough, just enter the variables and you would have:

You’ll notice in the variables the characters %(), this is what tells the Project that these are variables, and I didn’t enter the variables this way, I just entered ServerName and when I tabbed out of the filed the $() were automatically added.  So now you can see the variables in your command variables dialog (under project properties).  The first two are created with every project and you’ll see since I specified a value up above, the value is already used, instead of needing to set it at deployment time.

So now that we have the variables, how does this actually get used when we go to deployment?  I’m glad you asked, on deployment a .sql file is created that utilized sqlcmd mode.  So the output at deployment time time will be:

Notice that there is no value for the DefaultDataPath, as I never did set it at deployment time.  So there you have it, you can now parameterize your project dependencies!