Last Thursday I presented my session “Introduction to SSDT” at the SQL Supper event held at the offices of 7 Digital (loved the samosas, guys). I did my usual spiel, tour of the IDE, connected development, declarative database development yadda yadda yadda… and at the end asked if there were any questions. One gentleman in attendance (sorry, can’t remember your name) raised his hand and stated that by attempting to evangelise all of the features I’d missed the single biggest benefit of SSDT, that it can tell you stuff about database that you didn’t already know.

I realised that he was dead right. SSDT allows you to import your whole database schema into a new project and it will instantly give you a list of errors and/or warnings pertaining to the objects in your database. Invalid references (e.g a long-forgotten stored procedure that refers to a non-existent column), unnecessary 3-part naming, incorrect case usage, syntax errors…it’ll tell you about all of ‘em! Turn on static code analysis (this article shows you how) and you’ll learn even more such as any stored procedures that begin with “sp_”, WHERE clauses that will kill performance, use of @@IDENTITY instead of SCOPE_IDENTITY(), use of deprecated syntax, implicit casts etc…. the list goes on and on.

I urge you to download and install SSDT (takes a few minutes, its free and you don’t need SQL Server or Visual Studio pre-installed), start a new project:

right-click on your new project and import from your database:

and see what happens:

You may be surprised what you discover. Let me know in the comments below what results you get, total number of objects, number of errors/warnings, I’d be interested to know!

@Jamiet