• I am a proponent of the manual scripts method (with some automation ).

    Most of the drawbacks listed by the author can be summarised as "its a big hassle for the DBA". This is true in many situations, especially for some table and index changes and I am interested in seeing part 2.

    For the bulk of development which is stored procs, views, functions and new tables, I use a hierarchical directory of folders sorted in the order that scripts must be applied and have a script called RunSQL which runs all the scripts.

    With reference data, my RunSql script can read text files in comma delimited form and these are kept in VSS.