DB Designer in Visual Studio 2010

I need to create an entirely new Sql Server 2008 database and want to use a Database Project in Visual Studio 2010 (Ultimate). I've created the project and added a table under the dbo schema.

The table .sql is shown only as plain text, though with colors. It has no designer, no Add Column, and no autocomplete. Existing column's properties are grayed out.

Usually, I use DB Project for nothing more than开发者_JAVA技巧 storing .sql files for source control purposes, but I'm assuming it can help me with designing the DB. Currently, it offers no such help and I think it's because I'm doing something wrong. Perhaps I need to deploy the DB to server first, or something of the such. I've looked for a Getting Started guide, but all guides I found start from importing an existing database.

Please help my understand what a DB Project can do for me and how.

Thanks,

Asaf

The whole idea of the VSTS DB is to get you set on the right path, ie. store database object definitions as .sql files, not as some fancy diagram. Any modification you do to the objects you do it by modifying the SQL definition. This way you get to do any modification to the objects, as permitted by the DDL syntax, as opposed to whatever the visual-designer-du-jour thinks you can and can't do. Not to mention the plethora of SQL code generation bugs associated with all designers out there.

The closes to a visual view is the Schema View, which shows tables, columns, indexes etc in a tree view and you can see the properties from there.

By focusing the development process and the Visual Studio project on the .sql source files, teams can cooperate on the database design using tried and tested source control methods (check-out/check-in, lock file, conflict detection and merge integration, branching etc).

the deliverable of a VSTS DB project is a the .dbschema file, which can be deployed on any server via the vsdbcmd tool. This is an intelligent deployment that does a a schema synchronization (merge of new object, modifies existing ones) and can detect and prevent data loss during deployment. By contrast, the 'classical' way of doing it (from VS Server eExplorer, or from SSMS) the deliverable was the MDF file itself, the database. This poses huge problems at deployment. The deployment of v1 is really smooth (just copy the MDF, done), but as soon as you want to release v1.1 you're stuck: you have a new MDF, but the production is running on its own MDF and does not want to replace it with yours, since it means data loss. Now you turn around and wish you have some sort of database schema version deployment story, and this is what VSTS DB does for you from day 0.

You might be better off downloading the SQL Server Management Studio for SQL Server 2008 Express - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C243A5AE-4BD1-4E3D-94B8-5A0F62BF7796

Using this tool you can create your database using the visual tools provided by that software. You can run your .sql script to build up the database and then visually adjust columns settings, table relationships, etc.

Once you have your database designed open up Visual Studio and open a connection to this database using the Server Explorer.

Visual Studio is ok for simple tweaks and changes to an existing database structure but for anything serious like making the database from scratch I would recommend using the Management Studio. It's free and built for that exact purpose :)