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

New-DlmDatabaseConnection

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

New-DlmDatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "WidgetIntegration"

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

New-DlmDatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "WidgetIntegration" -Username "sa" -Password "P@ssw0rd"

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

$testdb = New-DlmDatabaseConnection -ServerInstance "test01\sql2014" -Database "WidgetIntegration"
Sync-DlmDatabaseSchema -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-DlmDatabaseSchema cmdlet.

We'll look at Sync-DlmDatabaseSchema in more detail later in this tutorial.

Test-DlmDatabaseConnection

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

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

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

If Test-DlmDatabaseConnection can't connect to the database, it raises an error.

What next?

You're now ready to learn how to use New-DlmDatabaseConnection and Test-DlmDatabaseConnection with other SQL Release cmdlets, to set up Continuous Integration.