The SSMS Tools Pack created by Mladen Prajdić is a great extension for the SQL Server Management Studio. In this post I will explain how you can use it to create test data from a small subset of your production database.
SQL Server uses a rather unconventional way to show you its version. If you open SQL Server Management Studio and connect to your database server, you will see something like the number 14.0.3015.40. This is the build number of your SQL Server version, but how do you translate this into a SQL Server version like SQL Server 2017 Cumulative update 15 (CU15)?
The first time I tried the little task of downloading the SQL Server Data Tools in English it worked as intended. I went to the docs page at Microsoft.com, searched for the right version and made a click to start the download. As I tried this on my new company laptop, I constantly run into this error:
Visualising the tables and foreign keys inside a database is often a great help to understand what is going on. While there are many options to create such a diagram, the built-in feature of SQL Server is often all I need. However, since my last installation of my working machine I cannot create these diagrams. All I get is this error message:
Foreign keys are a fundamental feature of relational databases. They are the little helpers that ensure the integrity of your data. Even better, they help you with the documentation of your data. All you need to do is open the table definition and you see the foreign keys to the tables that this one depends on.
Json.NET by Newtonsoft is the de-facto standard when it comes to work with JSON in .Net. The library is very popular, offers great flexibility and is easy to use. Let’s look on what you have to do to serialize and deserialize objects to JSON.
After nearly 10 years it was time to migrate the website of the .Net User Group Bern. In the last part I explained my work on the transformation of the data and how we extended it to support new requirements. With all the data in the new structure, it is now time to load it into the new application.
After nearly 10 years it was time to migrate the website of the .Net User Group Bern. The last part was all about consolidating the data into one single JSON file. The next step is now to move that data into the new structure.
The website of the .Net User Group Bern worked without much change for nearly 10 years. A refresh was necessary and that gave us two options: Just use a shiny new design or use it as an opportunity to learn new skills and interesting technology. We went with the later one and one of the learning opportunities I picked was the migration of all the data. Our small data set is great to try out different approaches and I hope my post can help you with much bigger migrations as well.
Whenever I want to explain something that requires a database, I have to spend a lot of time to create the tables and test data before I even can start with the part I want to show. The more time I spend with the setup, the less time I have to write the blog posts. However, most examples do not require handcrafted tables. They would work with any table, as long as there is just enough test data.