Source Control tools for Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 scripts and database updates?

Question

We are currently using Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 - developing intranet ASP.NET applications that use (several) SQL Server databases.

We have been storing

Answer 1

My Org has been using both for two different projects, and I have become very partial to the RedGate tools. As you mention to get the full functionality you need the whole toolset from RedGate, but you get a lot of extras with that as well (including refactoring, or global search/replacing). For syncing of DEV to TEST/QA/PROD environments I use their Compare products to build out sets of scripts (which generally require further review). I don't really trust any tool to update an in-use schema unless I'm prepared to quickly restore it.

In contrast I found the MS tools to be overly complicated, which made them somewhat inflexible. We found ourselves in a pickle when we had some changes in the DB that needed to be synced to the project, but changes in the project that wouldn't allow it to be built without the changes from the DB... it ended up in a whole catch-22 scenario that required a LOT of manual editing (and resulted in testing and purchase of the RedGate tools).