This is one of my favorite topics, and I always get good questions. CBIG was no exception, with some great questions on managing database schema changes when using continuous delivery, how continuous delivery and continuous deployment differ, and how to manage this in a full BI environment.

One question came up that I needed to verify – “Can you call an executable from a post-deployment script in SSDT?” The scenario for this was running a third-party utility to handle some data updates. I have confirmed that the post-deployment scripts for SSDT can only execute SQL commands, so you can’t run executables directly from them. However, as we discussed at the meeting, you can add additional executable calls into the MSBuild scripts I demonstrated to manage that part of your deployment process.

I promised to make my presentation and demos available, so here they are. Please let me know if you have any questions.

I’ve attached the slides from the presentation. I’ve also attached a few definition files, one for a Performance Monitor data collector set, and two trace templates, one for SSAS and one for SQL Server. Feel free to customize these files as necessary for your own tuning efforts. Also, while these trace templates can be used in Profiler, the best thing to do is to generate the scripts from them to run the trace directly on the server – lower overhead and less impact on performance.

The file is located on my SkyDrive.