Do you want your own database?

Following an excellent post by Jeff Atwood on Coding Horror, I've found some further reading about database change management, a topic I first posted on a few weeks ago, following a session at SQLBits.

Jeff's post is focussed on build scripts but one of the comments is by a guy called Mike Hadlow, who wrote about source-controlling databases a while back. A lot of what he suggests fits in with the change management strategy suggested at SQLBits, but he also recommends that each developer should work on their own database, in the same way that each developer works on their own copy of the code. When a particular change has been unit-tested satisfactorily then the scripts are updated into the repository and the other developers can "get latest" to update their own databases.

It's not something I've ever tried, but I quite like the idea of applying continuous integration ideas to database development.

The second article doesn't say much itself but has links to some more articles about source-control, and a list of useful tools.