Large Database Projects

When you use the Visual Database Tools as part of a large software development effort, you can encounter several noteworthy situations:

• Multiple People Designing a Single Database   Several users can connect to a database and use the Visual Database Tools to alter the database design.  For information about coordinating the simultaneous activities of several users, see Multiuser Database Design.
  
  
• Evolutionary Development of a Deployed Database   After a database is deployed, design changes can become necessary as users expand the set of tasks they want to perform with the data.  For information about making changes to a deployed database, see Issues of Database Evolution.
  
  
• Multiple Versions of a Particular Database   Large projects can include many databases.  Even a project with a single database can have several copies of it — a development database, a test database, and a deployed production database.  During the lifetime of a deployed database application, changes and improvements are first made in the development database, then propagated to the test database, then propagated to the production database.  For information about using Visual Database Tools to propagate design changes from one database to another, see Development, Test, and Production Databases.