Jeff Atwood, in his blog post strongly recommends taking your database to source control. He mentions:
“
The database is a critical part of your application. If you deploy version 2.0 of your application against version 1.0 of your database, what do you get? A broken application. And that's why your database should always be under source control right next to your application code. You deploy the app, and you deploy the database. Like peanut butter and chocolate, they are two great tastes that taste great together.
”
In the past we’ve scripted our databases using the Visual Studio Database project and hand written our DDL and DML script for the data model and the default data.
Of-course Management Studio can do this as well but where this tool really scores is in it’s ability to generate the DML for data in the tables as well if you want it to.
This means now you can create your database and fill dummy data into it using Management Studio, then fire this tool, point it to this database and you get a ready to use SQL script which you can version control.
With a free tool to take your database to SVN and very little effort needed to achieve this, there is no reason why you shouldn’t keep your database in your SVN now.
So, is your database under version control? If not, go ahead, try this database. If you are manually writing your DDL and DML script for database schema and default data this tool might save you a lot of time as well.