Quick Tip on SQL Server 2008 Database Projects

I just imported the scripts from an existing SQL Server 2008 database. All went well, except that some of the stored procedures made reference to objects from system databases, which the newly imported scripts couldn’t resolve.

Database projects support making references to other databases in a few different ways. One way is via .dbschema files that you can generate from your projects. This approach is a loosely-coupled approach and improves reuse across your projects.

In the case of the master or msdb databases, Microsoft ships .dbschema files for these for this exact purpose. Simply add a database reference to your project and browse to the directory where Microsoft ships these files: [Program Files]\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\VSTSDB\Extensions\SqlServer\Version\DBSchemas, where Version is the version of SQL Server that you are using (such as 2005 or 2008).

For more info on using database references, here’s the link to MSDN:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386242.aspx