How do you store static data in your SQL Server Database Project in VS 2012

database, sql-server-2012, version-control, visual-studio-2012

Solution

You can use this approach:

- Put your reference data into XML files, one per table

- Add XML files with reference data to your database project

- Use a Post-Deployment script to extract the data from XML and merge it into your tables

Here is a more detailed description of each step, illustrated with an example. Let's say that you need to initialize a table of countries that has this structure:

create table Country (
    CountryId uniqueidentifier NOT NULL,
    CountryCode varchar(2) NOT NULL,
    CountryName varchar(254) NOT NULL
)

Create a new folder called `ReferenceData` under your database project. It should be a sibling folder of the `Schema Objects` and `Scripts`.

Add a new XML file called `Country.xml` to the `ReferenceData` folder. Populate the file as follows:

<countries>
    <country CountryCode="CA" CountryName="Canada"/>
    <country CountryCode="MX" CountryName="Mexico"/>
    <country CountryCode="US" CountryName="United States of America"/>
</countries>

Find `Script.PostDeployment.sql`, and add the following code to it:

DECLARE @h_Country int

DECLARE @xmlCountry xml = N'
:r ..\..\ReferenceData\Country.xml
'

EXEC sp_xml_preparedocument @h_Country OUTPUT, @xmlCountry

MERGE Country AS target USING (
    SELECT c.CountryCode, c.CountryName
    FROM OPENXML(@h_Country, '/countries/country', 1)
    WITH (CountryCode varchar(2), CountryName varchar(254)) as c) AS source (CountryCode, CountryName)
ON (source.CountryCode = target.CountryCode)
WHEN MATCHED THEN
    UPDATE SET CountryName = source.CountryName
WHEN NOT MATCHED BY TARGET THEN
    INSERT (CountryId, CountryCode, CountryName) values (newid(), source.CountryCode, source.CountryName)
;

I tried this solution only in VS 2008, but it should be agnostic to your development environment.

Problem

I am trying to use the SQL Server Database Project to keep all our table, stored procedure, views etc scripts. I now want a way to be able to keep all our reference (static) data as well. When the tool or project is run it will install all the DB objects and the insert all the reference data. I found similar articles for vs 2010 but they were using things like Team Edition for Database professionals. - Get our DB under source control. - Synchronize our local development DB with latest version in source control. - Work with Visual Studio 2012 and SQL Server 2012 - Use .Net tools as far as possible and not something like Redgate (Redgate is great but I don't want to for out for it just yet if I can use tools in VS 2012)

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