beyond compare pro source control integration

Good team communication, and good database development practices, with sensible use of schemas, will help minimize the number and complexity of merge conflicts, but they won’t eradicate them completely. To minimize these conflicts, and any disruption to the work of others, they should regularly merge changes in the opposite direction, from trunk-to-branch, so that the two don’t drift too far apart.Ī merge in either direction could be a complex process, especially if conflicts arise across many project files. Similarly, developers working in a branch will need to merge their changes into mainline, regularly, and deal with any conflicts that arise. When developers working on the same branch make conflicting changes to the same version of a file, in the shared repository, one will be obliged to perform a merge to resolve it. You will need to have installed Beyond Compare, one of the tools which integrates with SQL Source Control to resolve conflicts. This article describes a simple example of what it’s like to merge a conflict in SQL Source Control. When conflicting changes need to be resolved, during merge operations, a good strategy would be to switch to a tool whose dedicated purpose is to handle merging operations, such as Beyond Compare, or KDiff3, both of which integrate directly with SoC.

What happens, however, if one database developer changes the name of a column, while another team member updates its data type? Or two developers accidentally work on the same stored procedure, making conflicting changes? The source control system will alert the team to the conflict and allow them to decide the correct outcome, via a merge operation.

It allows each developer to work freely, on their own sandbox database, committing tested changes frequently to their local, and then to the shared team repository, directly from within SSMS, as well as updating their own work frequently with the changes of others. SQL Source Control (SoC) plugs directly into SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) and is built with the singular purpose of providing an efficient interface between each developer’s local, working copy of the database, in SSMS, and the source control repository.

Beyond compare pro source control integration