ReadyRoll's initial setup wizard is designed to help you develop and deploy changes to an existing database with ease.

This page provides information on how to do this by creating a baseline schema from an existing database.

Creating a baseline schema

Create a new ReadyRoll Database project. Once the project is created, the ReadyRoll setup wizard should appear:

Step through the wizard to specify a sandbox development environment in the area marked Development. You can specify an existing database, or allow ReadyRoll to create an empty one for you by selecting Create a New Database.

Specify the environment you would like to develop changes for in the area marked Deployment Target. This will be the environment you create a baseline schema from.

Continue through the wizard to the final page and click the Create Baseline button. This will cause ReadyRoll to do the following:

• Create two Migration Grouping folders – 1.0.0-Baseline and 1.1.0-Changes, under the Migrations directory.
• Import the schema of your Deployment Target into the 1.0.0-Baseline folder as a migration script
  
  •  This is a deployable representation of the schema – by running this script on an empty database you can re-create the schema of your Deployment Target.
• Populate the Offline Schema Model (OSM).
  
  • This is a static representation of the schema on your Deployment Target.
  • You will be prompted to enabled Programmable Objects later on in the process.

You're now ready to make changes to your database schema.

Making changes

In order to start making changes, you must synchronize your ReadyRoll project with Development and the Deployment Target.

If Development is empty this is simple – just click the Deploy Project button to deploy the baseline script to Development. This will make Development an exact representation of the schema on your Deployment Target.

If Development has changes that are not on your Deployment Target, you'll need to import these changes into your ReadyRoll project. Click Refresh from the toolbar of the ReadyRoll window. This scans the connected database for objects that are pending import. You will be able to review the objects that will be imported beforehand. It may be necessary to revert some changes – for instance if your development environment is behind your production environment. In this case you can right click the change and select Revert from the menu.

After clicking Import your schema will be imported into 1.1.0-Changes as a migration script.

You can also manually add migration scripts to the baseline folder. This is useful if your target database contains changes that could not be imported as part of the baselining process, such as static data.

Preparing the database project for your first deployment

1. ReadyRoll creates two objects in your database:
   • (Table) [dbo].[__MigrationLog] keeps track of the migrations and Programmable Object/additional scripts that have been executed against your database (additional executions of Programmable Objects/additional scripts will result in new rows being inserted)
   • (View) [dbo].[__MigrationLogCurrent] lists the latest version of each migration/Programmable Object/additional script to have been executed against the database
2. ReadyRoll inserts row(s) into the [dbo].[__MigrationLog] table:
   • Semantic Versioning is used to set the baseline. A row will be inserted for each file within the baseline folder (i.e. Migrations\1.0.0-Baseline\*.sql). Additionally, if the Programmable Objects option is checked, a row will be inserted for each file within your Programmable Objects folder (i.e. Programmable Objects\**\*.sql)
   • If you connected your ReadyRoll database project directly to your production environment and clicked Import, then a row will be inserted for each migration and Programmable Object that was generated by that import.

Deploying your changes to production

ReadyRoll supports several deployment mechanisms. You can learn more about these on the Deployment documentation page.