What are the real benefits of Visual Studio Team System Database Edition (GDR)?

Question

Interested if anyone has used VSTS Database Edition extensively and, if so, which features did you find the most useful over the standard Visual Studio database projects?

What are the most compelling features as opposed to alternative schema management options or tools like RedGate's SqlCompare etc?

Edit: Microsoft just released the RTM version of Database Edition (GDR) which adds support for SQL Server 2008 - link is here. I've previously blogged (briefly) about it here.

Has anyone had a chance to do any real work with the GDR? It looks like there are some real enhancements including refactoring support. I'd be really interested to hear if people are using it with SQL Server 2008...

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Answer 1

We use the database edition functionality of Team Suite on Stack Overflow. As Vaibhav said, mostly it is useful because it gives you a one-click way to reverse engineer a database into source control, and keep it up to date.

Note that it also has decent Data and Schema compare tools as well. You can compare projects to physical databases and vice-versa. This makes it pretty easy to keep your database up to date, no matter where you make changes -- in the filesystem database project, or in the physical database itself.

Answer 2

If you compare it to tool like RedGates, that are specifically taylored for SQL Server, the benefits are that if you have the proper MSDN subscription you do not have to spend more money for other tools (but keep in mind that RedGate tools are much more mature) and it covers some points (like regression tests and unit tests at the DB level) that other tools do not cover and it make so in a integrate manner with other testing tool of VSTS, so that you can record results in Team System.
Compared to a tool like Embarcadero ErStudio (my solution of choice) it misses the cross database features, and this is a big problem, at least for me.
If you are a "all Microsoft" shop with the proper MSDN subscription it could be worth spending time on it.