• Gary Varga (12/19/2014)


    Whilst a nice idea, I don't think that it is practical. Usually in source control we are only interested in versioning each submission otherwise we would be tracking every file changed. I, for one, would not be interested in the 10 intermediate changes to a stored procedure that occurred before the developer deemed it suitable for submission.

    Yes, most of the time it is unused but much like other logs or even Source Control itself it is only really useful if something is wrong or if you need some stats.

    For our dev environment I use the DDL log to indicate which objects are altered. For changes with lot of alterations to sql objects or new objects I like to verify it matches my notes. This is especially useful for changes that take a long time to implement. Usually Grants are the things that get overlooked. And grants are more than 1/3 of the changes logged in our production log which is 12 years old tracking over 3K+ objects tracking 16K+ changes. In production we also have a pre and post procedure which links the Change Request Number to the DDL log records. For troubleshooting I usually look at the log to see the last changes done and under what Change Requests. If there was a recent relevant change, I can them contact those involved in the change request to help troubleshoot.