Phil Factor (9/17/2012)

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The idea of saying that one should never do shared database development is ridiculous, especially nowadays when you can have the best of both worlds and use database source control whilst doing either shared or single-user database-development, or both. The reason for doing your development work on your own server is merely to allow you to work on different versions of the database 'at once', which means that you can re-create a version from source control in your own private server and fix a bug or add a feature, without affecting your colleagues, or damaging other versions. I've always advocated doing both types of database development, depending on the task. The private databases are fine for prototyping, trying things out and doing sandbox development, whilst the shared model gives us extremely rapid integration, since we have schemas that prevent developers from banging heads too badly whilst sharing, source control allow us to roll back from a development mistake, virtualization to allow us to work on as many versions as we can tolerate.

I don't understand why there should be objection to the mixed-model of database development. I understand the build and integration problems that come from database application developments that chose to ignore the best-practice of having defined interfaces between application and database, but to try to anathemise or prescribe the perfectly reasonable practice of shared database development as a consequence, is like insisting that everyone should use crutches merely because you've shot yourself in the foot.