Question

If I have a procedure definition that has been stored in source control, is it necessary or helpful to keep the ‘tombstone’ up to date as well?

Here’s what I mean by a ‘tombstone’:

CREATE proc [dbo].[getCreditTransactions]      
AS   
/*
2001-02-12 jdoe : created proc
2003-04-15 kdoe : added handling for credit business rules 
*/
etc... 

Answer 1

To not update the tombstone, would assume that people are entering pertinent information when checking the update into source control. This was a big problem at my last job – it was company policy but there was no means of implementing business rules to enforce the behavior.

A benefit of having the tombstone updated would be:

• to see history without needing access to source control
• if source control software was changed – the history wouldn’t be lost.