Jamie Thomson (3/10/2011)
The big benefits as far as I can see them are:
-Development-time error checking (i.e. find out about errors before you actually run the code - so you wont get caught by deferred name resolution)
-Declarative development. (i.e. You define what the database state should be and the tool works out how to get it to that state, as opposed to you having to author all of the ALTER statements)
-Code analysis (i.e. it highlights bad coding practices)
The second one does look like it might swing it. Up to now, we've tended to hand-write upgrade and rollback scripts for each release. It works, but it's time-consuming and quite clunky. I imagine this would be an improvement on that approach.