Category: Red Gate

In my previous posts I discussed how you could create printable documentation from SQL Doc. In this post, I want to discuss how you can customize the front cover of the documentation. By default, the output of the Word cover will look like this.

Within the SQL Doc installation directory (C:Program FilesRed GateSQL Doc 2), there is a style directory.  This style directory contains different artefacts used when generating the documentation, within the Word folder there is a file called DefaultCoverPage.doc. This is just a standard Word document, with placeholder fields used to insert the appropriate information for the document during generation. You can now customize the cover as you see fit such as including your own information, logo etc. For example, below I’ve moved the Red Gate logo, added an additional title, changed the size and colour of the title while moving the created date time to the footer of the page.

The next time a Word document is generated on that machine the new cover page will be used.

A ‘word’ of warning for users on Vista, you will need to run Word as Administrator, or save the customized cover page to a different path and copy the file back as Program Files is a restricted location which requires elevated permissions to write too.

I would also recommend taking a copy of the original cover in case you want to revert back. If you do accidentally change the cover page without taking a backup, delete the file DefaultCoverPage.doc and repair the installation via the control panel. This will restore the application to the original install files.

In my previous post I explained how you can use SQL Doc 2.0 to document ASPNetDB and produce a Microsoft Word document. One huge advantage of having it in Microsoft Word is that it can be exported to a number of different formats very easily – for example PDF or XPS.

To do this from Word 2007, the first step is to download the Word 2007 Save as PDF XPS addin from here – http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&displaylang=en.  After installing this you will have a new option within your Save As menu.

After producing your database documentation as a Document, simple select this option to save the document.  It will ask you where you wish to save the document and the format it should be saved as. You can select between PDF, or Microsoft’s XPS Document – both work exactly perfectly, it’s just personal choice.

Once you have selected your location, the document will open. This is how the PDF document looks, which you can download from here

This is how the XPS document looks within IE8, which you can download here.

The document looks exactly the same as the original word output, however it can now be shared in different formats.

However, if you don’t have Office 2007, all is not lost. There is a free download available called CutePDF Writer where you can print any document or file as a PDF – very useful to have installed.

By selecting this as your printer, it will create you a PDF document which you can then use as you wish. For those of you with .Net 3.0 framework installed, there is an XPS Document Writer installed, which is very similar to CutePDF.  This will create you XPS documents in exactly the same way.

A 14 day free trail of SQL Doc can be downloaded from http://www.red-gate.com/Products/SQL_Doc

Last week I successfully released my first project! The project was a major release of SQL Doc from Red Gate which allows you to easily document your database schema. While maybe not as popular as SQL Compare, it solves a problem many people experience very effectively.

With SQL Doc 2.0, we had very clear aims and goals for what we wanted to achieve. We used a variety of different sources, such as support calls and forum posts, to identity the core features people where asking for. This provided us with three main features:

• Printable documentation
• Improve the description editor
• Be able to use the links within the preview panel

With 2.0, we implemented the above features along with a series of small, yet important, changes to improve the overall experience for the user.

Documenting ASPNetDB

With ASP.net, there is a database called ASPnetDB, by default this is where various settings and data is stored for the built-in ASP.net providers, such as Membership and Personalization. While most of the time you don’t need to interact with the database directly, the times you do are extremely difficult due to the lack of documentation and the fact that SQL Server Management Studio isn’t designed for gaining a high level picture of the database schema. This is one example of where SQL Doc can help.

Upon connecting to your server, you can select the database(s) you wish to document. Here I’ve just selected aspnetdb.

Once you have selected all your databases, click Generate Documentation… SQL Doc can output the documentation to three different formats, CHM, HTML and now Microsoft Word (.doc). Depending on your use-case depends on the type of documentation you might require – we feel SQL Doc provides you with excellent support, however if you feel we are missing something let us know.

To understand ASPNetDb, I want to print off the database schema as I always find reading this easier in paper format than online. As such, I select Document to be my output. After a few moments, Word will open and I will have my documentation produced.

We can now navigate and read the document using word, or print it off. The documentation itself contains all the same information it would have within CHM or HTML, it’s just now in a printable format.

You can download this sample document here.

We also include the functionality to filter down the different objects, for example I might only want to include tables and stored procedures within the documentation. Using the treeview down the size, we can unselect the objects and categories we do not wish to be included.

By default, we include the SQL creation script for each database object, while this is very interesting certain users requested the ability to exclude this – which we have done. Within the Edit Project dialog there is a check box to include the SQL creation script, untick this and it will no longer be included.

The documentation now only includes the relevant sections while shorter due to the lack of SQL Scripts.  Feel free to take a look here.

You can download a 14 day free trail from our website:

http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql_doc

At the moment I’m working on a web application, using ASP.net MVC connected to SQL Server 2005. As part of this work, I wanted to script out my current database schema into a flat file. I had created my SQL Database using SQL Management Studio on my laptop, but I wanted to reliability deploy this onto a machine in the office. 

Luckily, I had Red Gate SQL Compare to hand (Surprising as I work for Red Gate :))! This allows for a number of different approaches, such as connecting to the office via VPN and syncing my two databases or syncing to a scripts folder, but I found SQL Compare could create a single SQL file containing my database schema just using the command line tool.

The command below will sync my local Northwind database schema into a file called Schema.sql. If the file already exists, I override it.

SQLCompare.exe /database1:Northwind /scriptfile:”C:NorthwindSchema.sql” /force

Perfect!! I can now use SQL Cmd or SSMS to execute the file to produce my schema.

The same command works for SQL Data Compare, allowing me to script all the data in the database to a single sql file.

SQLDataCompare.exe /database1:Northwind /scriptfile:”C:NorthwindData.sql” /force

NOTE: These scripts do not include the USE statement, as such they will run under the database your connected on. You just need to be aware of what database your connected to or which database you use in your connection string