I started to use the database projects that are in Visual Studio to start keeping better track of schema and stored procedure changes. I love the idea of it, but I have hit a little bit of a hiccup. In development, the tables in my database are not replicated, as there is no need to. The test and production environments, however, are required to have merge replication. This of course adds a rowguid column and all of that jazz to all my tables.
So I guess my question(s) break down to this:
- how do I take advantage of the schema change scripts generated by using the deployment within database projects, but yet have replication set up in my test (or production) environments?
- Is there some way to ignore this rowguid column?
- If so do I have to worry about breaking replication when deploying? (I understand that some changes to schemas can cause replication to break anyways, but under normal circumstances that is)
I assume other people have hit this type of scenario, where their separate development environment wouldn’t require something such as replication set up (or if you use something like SQL express, can’t have it set up) and then want to take advantage of tools such as the schema comparison, or the database deployment options. Thank you for all of your help.
I think you are out of luck, sorry.