Database Builds

More SQL Server NAnt Tasks

Bill Graziano — Sun, 08 May 2005 19:26:00 GMT

I've updated my NAnt tasks to 0.94 (source and binary). I've added three new tasks.

The first is a task to load an Excel spreadsheet into a SQL Server table. We've found this to be a fair way to manage code tables. They're easy to edit and print out for review. They don't handle the foreign key checking until we load them in but that's been a fair trade-off for their ease of use.

The second task imports an image file into SQL Server. It's basically a mirror image of TEXTCOPY.EXE except that it's a NAnt task and the trust connection works.

The last task is an updated SQL task from NAntContrib. This version adds back proper column formatting for result sets. They should come out nice and lined up. We have SELECT statements in our build that we wanted to see in a readable format.

I'm considering writing a task that will execute a series of SQL files against SQL Server to create stored procedures. The key being that it will sequence them properly. I've got a rough draft working but it's not very fast at this point. It will also process the command files that Visual Studio generates.

NAnt Task to Restore a SQL Server Database

Bill Graziano — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 19:52:00 GMT

In my long tradition of releasing odd utilities (ok, utility) that no one but me uses I think I've come up with a winner. On one of my projects we've created an extensive database build process using NAnt. This process creates the database with all its objects and runs a series of jobs to populate data. Much of that data comes from other databases on the same server. At the start of the build process we need to restore a series of database backups as of specific dates. Since this script can run against a variety of developer workstations, test servers, QA servers, etc. we need to restore these backups into a variety of directories.

This NAnt task will restore a database backup onto the target server. The task will query the server to determine the proper location for the data files and log files and move them to the proper directory. It will also rename the files based on the database name. It can set the database to simple recovery mode and shrink it. It handles multiple data and log files but only restores the first backup in a backup file.

You can download the binary and the source code. It is a NAnt task so you'll need to be using NAnt to use it. Installation is as simple as dropping the DLL into NAnt's bin directory.

If you're running any kind of build script in your development process and aren't using NAnt I'd encourage you to look at it. It's a great tool!

UPDATE: I've release 0.92 which you can download here: (binary and source code)

UPDATE: I've released 0.94.

Building with NANT

Bill Graziano — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:26:00 GMT

TheServerSide.NET has a great article up on building your solution using NANT. It was interesting to read since I'm working on an article on our database build process.