If you use a database as a source for any of the SQL Change Automation cmdlets, you'll first need to use the New-DatabaseConnection cmdlet to set up the connection details to the database. You can also use the Test-DatabaseConnection cmdlet to check the connection works. This page provides an overview of these cmdlets.

New-DatabaseConnection

Use this cmdlet to specify the connection details for a database, which you can then use as the input for other SQL Change Automation cmdlets.

New-DatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "AdventureWorksIntegration"

If you aren't using Windows Authentication, you'll also need to specify the username and password for the SQL Server account:

New-DatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "AdventureWorksIntegration" -Username "sa" -Password "P@ssw0rd"

By assigning the output of New-DatabaseConnection to a variable, you can reuse this as the input for another cmdlet:

$testdb = New-DatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "AdventureWorksIntegration"
Sync-DatabaseSchema -Source "C:\Work\scripts" -Target $testdb

In the example above, we've assigned the connection to our test database to the variable, $testdb. We've then used this as the input for the Sync-DatabaseSchema cmdlet.

Test-DatabaseConnection

Use this cmdlet to check the connection you specified in the New-DatabaseConnection cmdlet works. 

$testdb = New-DatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "Test" | Test-DatabaseConnection

In the example above, we've used the pipe (|) symbol to take the output of New-DatabaseConnection and input it into Test-DatabaseConnection.

If New-DatabaseConnection can't connect to the database, it raises an error.

What next?

You're now ready to learn how to use New-DatabaseConnection and Test-DatabaseConnection with other SQL Change Automation cmdlets, to set up continuous integration.