The Background
My group has 4 SQL Server Databases:
Production
UAT
Test
Dev
I work in the Dev environment. When the time comes to promote the objects I've been working on (tables, views, functions, stored procs) I make a request of my manager, who promotes to Test. After testing, she submits a request to an Admin who promotes to UAT. After successful user testing, the same Admin promotes to Production.
The Problem
The entire process is awkward for a few reasons.
Each person must manually track their changes. If I update, add, remove any objects I need to track them so that my promotion request contains everything I've done. In theory, if I miss something testing or UAT should catch it, but this isn't certain and it's a waste of the tester's time, anyway.
Lots of changes I make are iterative and done in a GUI, which means there's no record of what changes I made, only the end result (at least as far as I know).
We're in the fairly early stages of building out a data mart, so the majority of the changes made, at least count-wise, are minor things: changing the data type for a column, altering the names of tables as we crystallize what they'll be used for, tweaking functions and stored procs, etc.
The Question
People have been doing this kind of work for decades, so I imagine there have got to be a much better way to manage the process. What I would love is if I could run a diff between two databases to see how the structure was different, use that diff to generate a change script, use that change script as my promotion request. Is this possible? If not, are there any other ways to organize this process?
For the record, we're a 100% Microsoft shop, just now updating everything to SQL Server 2008, so any tools available in that package would be fair game.
