Thanks Andy for an interesting article, like some of the others I'm not sure I can see myself going down the test-driven route in the same way, but it's good to see how it's done.

Interesting discussion about Alter vs Drop/Create. Here we Alter on the dev db, but deploy with drop/create (with an appropriate permissions script at the end). Only in extremis do we resort to backup/restore or shipping mdfs; apart from being poor practice in that it can mask broken code, there's generally too much hassle with realigning the permissions & getting round collation issues.

I know this is taking the discussion off-topic but I think there could be some mileage in a SQL Server Mythbusting article to debunk those things everybody 'knows' about SQL Server. Obviously the Exists thing is a prime candidate. Other ones that come to mind are 'Table Variables are always held in memory/Temp tables are always written to disk', 'Subqueries perform worse than joins', 'Cross Joins are always bad' and 'Cursors are always bad' (note the 'always' - I'm not disputing that they're abused an awful lot of the time 🙂 )

Cheers,

Ian