General Distribution Release (GDR) for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) Database Edition : Formerly known as Power Tools or Data Dude

In November 2008, the General Distribution Release (GDR) for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 (VSTS) Database Edition was released. The GDR installs on top of the initial release of VSTS 2008 Database Edition, but it is more than a minor version upgrade. The GDR adds support for SQL Server 2008, incorporates improvements to existing features, includes many new features and extensibility points, and incorporates features that were previously released as power tools.

New features in GDR includes support for offline schema development, tools that support new processes that you can use when you develop a database schema, and features that support database administration.

In addition to these process improvements, VSTS Database Edition GDR also provides the following capabilities:

• Interpretation and evaluation of your project's schema and interdependencies. Offline processing enables developers to catch syntax and reference errors prior to deployment.
• Refactoring—By using VSTS Database Edition, you can change the name of an object (such as a table or column), and that change will update all references to the new name.
• Automated differencing engine—When you deploy a project, it generates a Transact-SQL (T-SQL) script that contains only the necessary changes to make the target database match the source.
• Database unit testing—You can use a designer that enables development of T-SQL-oriented tests to exercise and verify your schema prior to checking in your code.
• Test data generation—You can use this tool to generate pseudo-random realistic test data that can be used when you run unit tests.

The points mentioned above about GDR are excerpt from an article titled "Introducing New Features In The VSTS Database Edition GDR" by Jamie Laflen and Barclay Hill. This article is published in the March 2009 issue of MSDN Magazine.