One the features long sought after by developers is a reliable and easy way to maintain source control on SQL Server databases. Especially on Agile projects where multiple developers are making changes to a database schema at the same time, database source control is an absolute necessity.

Fortunately, Microsoft now provides a tool to synchronize schema changes across databases and store the change history in source control. This tool is availble in Visual Studio 2010 and is called the SQL Server 2008 Database Project.

I did a simple benchmark for the 3 main databases (Oracle 11g, MySQL 5.1, SQL Server 2008) to see how using ODBC compares to using their native providers in .NET for all database access. To keep things on an even playing field, all 3 databases were run on the same machine, with the exact same database name, table name, and schema. Database authenticaton was used by all databases.

I’ve created a tool to help test different connection strings and settings for the various databases. The information out there on certain database connection types is poor at best so this was put together over a week long process of testing and reverse engineering. A lot of forums and blog posts were pieced together to figure all of this out.