Verify that target database schema complies with what's in Entity Framework?

Question

We have a process where our database guys script changes (and version them using Juneau) to our application's database out-of-band with our code base. They're good at accounting for new columns being null, and not wiping existing data, but occasionally a column rename sneaks in that isn't fully communicated. So they will make some changes to the database schema on a testing server, we'll update Entity Framework to work with those changes, and then commit our code. This process works okay, except for when it's time to deploy.

We have TFS set up to deploy the successful build to the appropriate servers, but there's no guarantee that the database for that environment has been updated. We don't care if extra fields/tables/views/etc. exist in the target database, but we want change the build to check that the database contains at least everything EF is aware of.

I looked at this question, but I don't need the schema to match exactly. Plus, we don't want it creating/modifying the database directly. And this question seems like it's trying to achieve a similar ideal, but still not quite what we're looking to achieve. We just want a integration test of sorts to verify our version of EF will work with the target schema.

Answer 1

I wonder why you try to deploy your application without changes to database. Your application is dependent on the database so the deployment should always be done after the database. It looks like you are going to invest a lot of time to develop validation to fix your incorrect deployment process (where fixing the process itself is the correct solution).

Anyway you can create some "validation" of the database but it will take some time. If you are using EDMX file you can open it as XML and read its SSDL part which describes all expected tables, columns, relations, views (in form of SELECT SQL queries), stored procedures and functions. You can parse this XML part and use system database views (sys.tables, sys.columns, ...) to query if these objects exists in the database.

Another approach can be using database diff. tool to compare your current test database with the target one. This will require the tool which can be executed from command line and you will have to parse its output to find breaking changes.