I am working on a new project which is in asp.net 2.1 web API
here I am using Code first migration in local DB
so to deploy my app to test environment I need to know
best and safe practice for database migration because this is a new project and in the future daily base there will be a lot of changes may occur
Well it sounds like you are mixing migration with deployment.
Migration with Code First means making changes in your Data model.
Deploying your code or database to Production is something different.
I assume you are referring to deployment in your question.
Best way of deployment for both applications and databases is to automate it.
Jenkins, TFS, Teamcity , Octopus are some of the popular CD tools.
To automate the database deployment you need to write custom libraries.
In one of the companies I worked we check in the DDL script to source code and automated build library drops all the stored procs, functions . Runs the ddl script and re-creates all the stored procs,functions.
This way we can be 100% sure all the Environments(QA,Staging, Prod) are in sync .
Best practices are actually provided by Microsoft here
Apart from that, this repository provides a good enterprise-level example of how .NET Core Web App/API projects should be written and describes the following practices that help the project scale reliably as the project size grows. It is also updated regularly.
Full architecture with responsibility separation concerns, SOLID and
Clean Code
Domain Driven Design (Layers and Domain Model Pattern)
Domain Events
Domain Notification
CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation)
Event Sourcing
Unit of Work Repository and Generic Repository
i developed C# application for windows the back end is mysql database but the problem is, if i want to run it in different computer it requires mysql server software or other wise it cant open the data base. is there any way to add plugins to the s C# application or adding open source software to my installation package to run the database file. please note i'm new to C# this is for education purpose sorry for if my questions asking method is not professional.
Front end : visual studio 2013
Back End : Mysql server 2008
I dont know if i got your question right but i assume it a general Data Access Layer strategy question.
If you "bind" your application with mySQL or any other db then that's it.
Depending on the size of the application you could use open source db like SQLite It is a one file db that can be stored with your application.
If you really want to be able to use your software with many underlying DBs then you have alot of job.
THIS question in SO debates that maybe it is not a good idea or at least it is a partially good idea. Partially means that you could abstract basic db behavior to be db independent but you will not get rid off the dependencies 100%
Another good approach would be to use an ORM. Either a micro ORM like dapper or afull ORM like Nhibernate
ORMs let you do just that. You can use an OleDb provider and have access to many underlying sources at a cost of course of not using 100% the native capabilities of the DB....
I would like to use the EntityFramework model to connect to an embedded SQLite database in my C# application. Everything works fine but as this is the first version of the software I expect future changes to have a cause changes to the structure of the database.
I am concerned since I do not know when a user would upgrade from ver.1 to say ver 2. how to alter the strucure of the embedded database and of course save the existing data.
Anybody else run into this issue, and how did you solve it ?
Thanks
I wrote a complete upgrade framework in C# to handle this type of problem. It served me well in a big client project and saved me tons of work in the process.
You can read about it Here. It is in the public domain so you can use it for your projects (including commercial projects) without paying anything :-)
If you have any specific questions I'll be happy to help.
I got an idea but an unsure if it is a correct approach:
write an small external tool to alter(upgrade) the database structure, and run this in the application installer.
What do you think about such an approach ?
My company provides a large .NET service-oriented solution. The services layer interact with a T-SQL back-end consisting of hundreds of tables and stored procedures. Our C# code is in version-control (SVN) but our stored procedures and schema are not.
After much lobbying of expedient upper-management, I was allowed to review our (non-existent) build/deployment process to accomplish the following goals:
Place schema and stored procedures under source-control.
Automate the build/deployment process.
I would like to proceed per the accepted answer's strategy in this post but have additional questions:
I would like to use Hudson as my build server. Is this a reasonable choice for a C#/SQL solution? What better alternatives should I explore?
Assuming I have all triggers, stored-procedures, schema, etc... under source control, and that they are scripted to individual files, how do I generate a build script which will take into account dependencies/references between these items? (SQL Server does this automatically, but it generates one giant script)
What does the workflow of performing an update at the client look like? i.e. I have to keep existing table data. How do I roll-back schema changes?
I am the only programmer. Several other pseudo-technical staff like to make changes directly inside SQL Management Studio. Is it realistic to expect others to adhere to this solution -- how can I enforce this?
Thank you in advance for your help.
Edit:
Unfortunately we will not be able to use TFS. We do have Visual Studio 2008/2010 with the Database Project components available, though, so it looks like I'll have to hack together a script-based solution. Any suggestions/updates are appreciated..
The canonical example on the Microsoft stack for T-SQL deployment is the Visual Studio Database Project deployment process. In this process, your database schema, procedures, right assignment and pretty much all else are stored as pieces of a VSDB project, which means that they are stored as SQL definition files, and checked under source control (SVN is fine). The 'build' process delivers a .dbschema file, which is a file that contains a synthesis of the entire VSDB project (is a glorified XML file). The .dbschema file is then shipped into the deployment server (development server, QA validation server, even produciton server) and 'deployed'. Deployment is done via the vsdbcmd tool which will run a sophisticated diff between the deployment server and the .dbschema file and 'align' the server to the content of the .dbschema file, using CREATE/ALTER/DROP statements as appropriate, based on what exists in the target database/server.
A contiguously integrated process would start a nightly build, drop the .dbschema along with other deliverable on the test SQL server, deploy the .dbschema, then run build validation tests, and if all good in the end will drop a fully build and QA validated deliverable, the daily 'drop'. Fully integration all the way to deployment into production is possible, but usually avoided due to risk of unexpected downtime on the central, production, server. However, fully integration and deployment into production is usually the norm for multi-server environments, where 'production' means hundreds/thousands of deployed servers.
Now you say that you want to deploy using Hudson, which is all good, except that you have to recreate everything I describe in the steps above as Ants build steps and you'll spend the next 10 years reinventing the VS DB project concepts, like a .dbschema file and a tools like vsdbcmd. I'm not the one that can make the call to invest into buying a VSDB and TFS based build server license, but I'm saying that I'm not aware of an end-to-end solution available in OSS. With VS 2010, the Database Projects are in Standard Edition, I believe. With VS 2008 you'd need the high end license.
As of users doing changes riding shot-gun from SSMS: you can prevent them using DDL triggers, you can track them using Event Notifications, or you can fully audit them using C2 compliant audit.
I am looking for a way to do daily deployments and keep the database scripts in line with releases.
Currently, we have a fairly decent way of deploying our source, we have unit code coverage, continuous integration and rollback procedures.
The problem is keeping the database scripts in line with a release. Everyone seems to try the script out on the test database then run them on live, when the ORM mappings are updated (that is, the changes goes live) then it picks up the new column.
The first problem is that none of the scripts HAVE to be written anywhere, generally everyone "attempts" to put them into a Subversion folder but some of the lazier people just run the script on live and most of the time no one knows who has done what to the database.
The second issue is that we have 4 test databases and they are ALWAYS out of line and the only way to truly line them back up is to do a restore from the live database.
I am a big believer that a process like this needs to be simple, straightforward and easy to use in order to help a developer, not hinder them.
What I am looking for are techniques/ideas that make it EASY for the developer to want to record their database scripts so they can be ran as part of a release procedure. A process that the developer would want to follow.
Any stories, use cases or even a link would helpful.
For this very problem I chose to use a migration tool: Migratordotnet.
With migrations (in any tool) you have a simple class used to perform your changes and undo them. Here's an example:
[Migration(62)]
public class _62_add_date_created_column : Migration
{
public void Up()
{
//add it nullable
Database.AddColumn("Customers", new Column("DateCreated", DateTime) );
//seed it with data
Database.Execute("update Customers set DateCreated = getdate()");
//add not-null constraint
Database.AddNotNullConstraint("Customers", "DateCreated");
}
public void Down()
{
Database.RemoveColumn("Customers", "DateCreated");
}
}
This example shows how you can handle volatile updates, like adding a new not-null column to a table that has existing data. This can be automated easily, and you can easily go up and down between versions.
This has been a really valuable addition to our build, and has streamlined the process immensely.
I posted a comparison of the various migration frameworks in .NET here: http://benscheirman.com/2008/06/net-database-migration-tool-roundup
Read K.Scott Allen's series of posts on database versioning.
We built a tool for applying database scripts in a controlled manner based on the techniques he describes and it works well.
This could then be used as part of the continuous integration process with each test database having changes deployed to it when a commit is made to the URL you keep the database upgrade scripts in. I'd suggest having a baseline script and upgrade scripts so that you can always run a sequence of scripts to get a database from it's current version to the new state that is needed.
This does still require some process and discipline from the developers though (all changes need to be rolled into a new version of the base install script and a patch script).
We've been using SQL Compare from RedGate for a few years now:
http://www.red-gate.com/products/index.htm
The pro version has a command line interface that you could probably use to setup your deployment procedures.
We use a modified version of the database versioning described by K. Scott Allen. We use the Database Publishing Wizard to create the original baseline script. Then a custom C# tool based on SQL SMO to dump the stored procedures, views and user functions. Change scripts which contain schema and data changes are generated by Red Gate tools. So we end up with a structure like
Database\
ObjectScripts\ - contains stored procs, views and user funcs 1-per file
\baseline.sql - database snapshot which includes tables and data
\sc.01.00.0001.sql - incremental change scripts
\sc.01.00.0002.sql
\sc.01.00.0003.sql
The custom tool creates the database if necessary, applies the baseline.sql if necessary, adds a SchemaChanges table if necessary and applies the change scripts as necessary based on what's in the SchemaChanges table. That process occurs as part of a nant build script each time we do a deployment build via cc.net.
If anyone wants the source code to the schemachanger app I can throw it up on codeplex/google or wherever.
If you are talking about trying to keep database schemas in sync, try using Red Gate SQL Comparison SDK. Build a temp database based on a create script (newDb) - this is what you want your database to look like. Compare newDb against your old database (oldDb). Get a change set from that comparison and apply it using Red Gate. You could build this upgrade process into you tests, and you can try and get all the devs to agree that there is one place where the create script for the database is kept. This same practice works well for upgrading your database across several versions and running data migration scripts and processes between each step (using an XML doc to map the create and data migration scripts)
Edit: With Red Gate technique, you only are concerned with create scripts, not upgrade scripts since Red Gate comes up with the upgrade script. It will also let you drop and create indexes, stored procedures, functions, etc.
Go here:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/get-your-database-under-version-control/
Scroll down a bit to the list of 5 links to the odetocode.com website. Fantastic five-part series. I would use that as a starting point to get ideas and figure out a process that will work for your team.
You should consider using a build tool like MSBuild or NAnt. We use a combination of CruiseControl.NET, NAnt, and SourceGear Fortress to handle our deployments, including SQL objects. The NAnt db build task calls sqlcmd.exe to update scripts in our dev and staging environments after they're checked into Fortress.
We use Visual Studio for Database Professionals and TFS to version and manage our database deployments. This allows us to treat our databases just like code (check out, check in, lock, view version history, branch, build, deploy, test, etc.) and even include them in the same solution files if we wish.
Our developers can work on local databases to avoid stepping on each other's changes in a shared environment. When they check database changes into TFS, we have continuous integration to build, test and deploy to our integrated dev environment. We have separate builds on release branches to create differential deployment scripts for each subsequent environment.
Later, if a bug is discovered in a release, we can go to a release branch and hotfix the code and database at the same time.
This is a great product, but its adoption was hindered early on due to a Microsoft marketing blunder. It was originally a separate product under Team System. This meant in order to use features of the developer edition and database edition at the same time, you were required to step up to the much more expensive Team Suite edition. We (and many other customers) gave Microsoft grief about this, and we were very happy they announced this year that DB Pro has been folded into the developer edition, and that immediately anyone licensed with developer edition can install the database edition.
Gus off-handedly mentioned DB Ghost (above) – I second it as a potential solution.
A brief overview of how my company is using DB Ghost:
After the schema for a new DB has been reasonably settled during initial development, we use the DB Ghost 'Data and Schema Scripter' to create script (.sql) files for all the DB objects (and any static data) and we check-in these script files into source control (the tool separates the objects into folders such as 'Stored Procedures', 'Tables', etc.). At this point, we can use either of the DB GHost 'Packager' or 'Packager Plus' tools to create a stand-alone executable to create a new DB from these scripts.
All changes to the DB schema are checked-in to source by check-ins to the specific script files.
At anytime we can use the packager to create an executable to either (a) create a new DB or (b) update an existing DB. Some customization is required for certain path-dependent changes (e.g. changes that require data to be updated), but we have pre-update and post-update scripts that are run.
The 'update' process involves the creation of a clean 'source' DB and then (after pre-update custom scripts), a comparison between the schemas of the source DB and the target DB. DB Ghost updates the target DB to match
We routinely make changes to production DBs (we have 14 customers in 7 different production environments) but inevitably deploy a large-enough set of changes with a DB Ghost update executable (created during our build process). Any production changes that were not checked-in to source (or that were not checked-in to the appropriate branch being released) are LOST. This has forced everyone to check-in changes consistently.
To summarize:
If you enforce a policy that all DB updates be deployed using a DB Ghost update executable, you can 'force' developers to consistently check-in their changes, regardless of whether they are deployed manually in the interim.
Adding a step (or steps) to your build process to create a DB Ghost update executable will in-effect perform a test to verify that a DB can be created from scripts (i.e. because DB Ghost creates a 'source' DB, even when creating the update executable package) and if you add a step (or steps) to execute the update package [on any of the four test DBs you mentioned], you can keep your test DBs in line with source.
There are some caveats and some limitations in what changes are 'easily' deployed with this tool (really a suite of related tools), but they are all fairly minor (at least for my company):
Renaming objects must be done in one of the custom scripts
The entire DB is always updated (e.g. objects in a single schema can't be updated alone) making it difficult to support customer-specific objects in the main application DB
The book Refactoring Databases addresses many of these issues at a conceptual level.
As far as tools go, I know that DB Ghost works well for SQL Server. I have heard that the Data Dude edition of Visual Studio has really been imporved upon in the latest release but I don't have any experience with it.
As far as really pulling off continuous integration style database development, it gets really resource instensive really fast because of the number of database copies you need. It is very doable when the database can fit on a developer workstation but impractical when the database is so large that it needs to be deployed across a grid. To do it you bacically need 1 copy of the database per developer [developers who make DDL changes, not just changes to procs] + 6 common copies. The common copies are as follows:
INT DEV --> Developers "check in" their refactoring to INT DEV for integration testing. When integration testing passes, this database is copied over to DEV.
DEV --> This is the "official" development copy of the database. INT DEV is refreshed regularly with a copy of DEV. Developers working on new refactorings get a fresh copy of the database from DEV.
INT QA --> Same idea as INT DEV except for the QA team. When integration tests pass here, this database is copied over to QA and to DEV*.
QA
INT PROD --> Same idea as INT QA except for production. When integration tests pass here, this database is copied over to PROD, QA*, and DEV*
PROD
*When copying databases across DEV/QA/PROD lines, you will also need to run scripts to update test data relevant to the particular environment (e.g. setting up users in QA that the QA team uses to test but that don't exist in production).
One possible solution is to look into implementing DML auditing on your test databases, then just rolling those audit logs into a script for final testing and live deployment. SQL Server 2008 significantly improves on DML auditing, but even SQL Server 2005 supports it via triggers.
There are a bunch of links in these posts that I'll want to follow up on (I "rolled my own" system years ago, have to see if there are similarities). One thing you will need, and that I hope is mentioned in these links, is discipline. I don't quite see how any automated system can work if anyone can change anything at any time. (Your question implies that this can happen on your production systems, but obviously that can't be true.)
Having one person (the fabled "database administrator") dedicated to the task of managing changes to databases, particularly production databases, is a very common solution. As for maintaining consistency across X development and testing databases: if it/they are used by many users, once again you are best served by having an individual act as a "clearing house" for changes; if everyone has their own database instance, then they're responsible for keeping it in order, and having a central consistent database "source" will be critical when they need a refreshed baseline database.
Here's a recent Stack Overflow post that may be of interest: how-to-refresh-a-test-instance-of-sql-server-with-production-data-without-using
Red Gate has a paper describing how to achieve build automation: http://downloads.red-gate.com/HelpPDF/ContinuousIntegrationForDatabasesUsingRedGateSQLTools.pdf
This is built around SQL Source Control, which integrates with SSMS and your existing source control system.
I've written a .NET based tool to handle database versioning in an automated fashion. We have been using this tool in production to handle rolling out database updates (including patches) to multiple environments, keep a log in each database of which scripts have been run, and do it all in an automated fashion. It has a command-line console so you can create batch scripts which use this tool. Check it out: https://github.com/bmontgomery/DatabaseVersioning
For what it's worth, this is a real example of a simple, low cost approach used by my former employer (and which I am trying to impress on my current employer as a basic first step).
Add a table called 'DB_VERSION' or similar. In EVERY upgrade script, add a row to that table which can include as little or as many columns as you see fit to describe the upgrade but at a minimum I would suggest { VERSION, EXECUTION_DATE, DESCRIPTION, EXECUTION_USER }. Now you have a concrete record of what has been going on. If someone runs their own unauthorised script you'd still need to follow the advice of the answers above, but this is just a simple way of dramatically improving on your existing versioning control (i.e. none).
Now let's you have an upgrade script from v2.1 to v2.2 of the database and you want to verify the lone maverick guy has actually run it on his database, you can just search for rows where VERSION = 'v2.2' and if you get a result, don't run this upgrade script. Can be built into a console utility app if necessary.