Saturday, August 15, 2015

Database Lifecycle Management - Dacpacs

I came across an excellent article recently @ Simple-Talk discussing Dacpacs, working with them, structures, etc. in quite a bit of detail for a short article. This post discuses benefits, drawbacks, and potential areas of concern for working with dacpacs for your database management.

https://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-delivery/microsoft-and-database-lifecycle-management-dlm-the-dacpac/

The PowerShell scripts are well worth checking out and there are several interesting calls for SQLPackage along the way. I appreciated his findings with some of the issues - not always seeing changes that should be detected. I suspect that there's a setting not configured properly there, but couldn't say for sure. I know that I haven't hit any issues when using SQLPackage and dacpacs for normal DB development of the sort discovered at the end of the article.

The conclusion is spot on, whatever solution you use - check your scripts, test, and verify before just putting the solution into production.