I have been working on a side project for the last few weeks, and built the system with EntityFramework Code first. This was very handy during development, as any changes i needed to make to the code were reflected in the DB nice and easily. But now that i want to launch the site, but continue development, i dont want to have to drop and recreate the DB every time i make a tweak to a model…
Is there a way to get EF to generate change scripts for the model change so i can deploy them myself to the production server? And how do i use the database somewhere else (Windows Service in the background of the site) without having to drop and recreate the table, and use the same model as I have already? Kind of like a “Code first, but now i have a production DB, dont break it…”
Personally i use the builtin data tools in VS2010 to do a database schema synchronization for updating production.
Another cheaper tool if you dont have VS Premium is SQLDelta which ive used in the past and is really good.
Both tools connect to the two database versions and allow you to synchronise the table schemas first. Both also have an export to SQL script functionality.
Comming up for EF is Migrations which allows you to solve just this problem within your solution however its still in beta. Migrations lets you describe upgrade and downgrade events for your database in code.