SQL Server Data Tools Released

On March 6, 2012, Microsoft released the first official release of the “SQL Server Data Tools” (SSDT) to the web. Even though this release accompanies SQL Server 2012 RTM, you can use SSDT against SQL Server 2005 or later, including SQL Azure. So download it now! and get started developing and deploying your SQL Server databases using SQL Server Data Tools.

“SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is a free database development environment for SQL Server which is hosted inside the Visual Studio shell. Even though SSDT will first ship as part of SQL Server 2012, it supports all existing SQL Server versions starting with SQL Server 2005, including SQL Azure. This means you can use it today to author, debug and deploy your database schemas targeting SQL Server 2005 SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2012 and SQL Azure.

SSDT builds upon the declarative database development foundations established by Visual Studio database projects, as such it provides a rich set of database schema authoring and deployment capabilities which is fully integrated in to the Visual Studio development environment.”

You can also download SSDT from the Web Platform Installer. Navigate to Products on the top and then to Database on the left side. SQL Server Data Tools will be in the list near the bottom. This is a free tool and will integrate into your VS2010 IDE.

Resources

The following are great blogs about SQL Server Data Tools:

• SQL Server Data Tools: http://sqlproj.com/
• SQL Server Data Tools Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ssdt/