The complete survey results may be downloaded from here.

Also see Amazon SimpleDB.

For every database in our Mainline codeline folder structure there are two child folders: Previous and Sprint. The Previous folder contains DDL files for every database schema object, including all BCP domain/default data files, necessary to restore a reference image of the last released database schema. In the folder structure below, the Previous folder contents would construct a 2007.2 equivalent database schema for MyDatabase2. The Sprint folder contains the DDL and DML necessary for active development work. In older codelines, the Sprint folder provides a quick snapshot of what happened in the database schema for that particular release.

1. providing easy restoration of previous versions
2. repeatable process that supports autonomous work
3. allow concurrent updates to the database schema objects
4. synchronization with the application code to ensure stable builds
5. storage of production regression test data
6. storage of default domain data
7. quick deployment of a specific version of a database schema through reference objects
8. a quick view of what happened to the database schema for a particular release.

For this post, I just wanted to expose a little PowerShell script to demonstrate how amazingly powerful this technology is. The following code enumerates the schema objects for a user-supplied Microsoft SQL Server database, and generates the corresponding T-SQL create script files for objects whose names match a user-supplied regular expression. I chose to enumerate the objects based upon the object name, but I have left script comments in to specify the enumeration using the schema object type (i.e. Stored Procedure, Table, Foreign Key, etc.). To create T-SQL create script files for all database schema objects simply supply ".*" as the regular expression to match.

While the SQLite Library core is C code, the number of language bindings available is staggering. As my SQLite introduction, I developed a simple .NET 2.0 assembly that uses SQLite to aggregrate Internet Explorer favorites from all of my PCs. The supplied command-line administration tool provides the capability to quickly generate a consumable html file of aggregated links. What is nice is that I can use the power of SQL to filter the aggregated links by title, date, grouping, etc. No surprise that Mozilla's Firefox 3 is moving to SQLite for storage of their bookmarks among other things.

One of the distinctive SQLite features that did lead to a data defect was column datatype affinity. While traditional databases use static datatyping on columns, SQLite uses the column datatype as a recommendation. In other words, you can store any value of any datatype into any column (except a column that specifies INTEGER PRIMARY KEY). I had improperly formatted the creationTime attribute for insertion which created a problem when attempting to use it in an ORDER BY later on. Besides column type affinity, it's also important to keep in mind that SQLite does not enforce RI and complicates table evolution with limited ALTER TABLE options.

It was extremely simple, and deserves a closer look for use in other endeavors. You can read the source listing in html here.