ABAPERLS

a Collection of Tools for CM and Development with SQL Server

AbaPerls is a collection of tools that have been in use at Abaris AB since 1996 to meet our needs to develop and deploy the database part of our systems. They have evolved a lot since 1996 – and we hope that they will keep evolving.

AbaPerls has pretty much been the baby of one man, Erland Sommarskog, and I am now pleased on Abaris' behalf to offer AbaPerls in the public domain. After all, we use the tools on every-day basis, so we feel that they are stable. Then again, we have developed them meet our needs, so there are certainly are some rough edges and some funny shortcuts.

As I said, they have been evolving since 1996, so AbaPerls is by now a quite rich and complex toolset. Here is a very brief overview of the main features:

• SourceSafe search and replace that ignore comments in source-code files.
• Loading SQL files:
  • Addtional checks of questionable usages, such as references to non-existing tables.
  • Automatic handling of DROP/CREATE and GRANT.
  • No need to include WITH ENCRYPTION in source – AbaPerls can add it.
  • A preprocessor for SQL files.
  • With AbaPerls you can mix collations on a server without conflicts in tempdb, as AbaPerls adds the necessary COLLATE clauses.
• Building an empty database from all SQL files in SourceSafe, or from a directory structure on disk.
• Generating update scripts to move a database from one SourceSafe label to one label to another.
• Ability to divide a database into "subsystems", that you can update independently.
• AbaPerls has its own system tables which permits you to keep an audit trail of when objects were loaded and update scripts were run.
• Generate INSERT-files from Excel workbooks.

AbaPerls presumes an environment of Windows, SQL Server (6.5 or later) with Visual SourceSafe as your version-control system. Sites that do not use SQL Server, but use SourceSafe, may still be interested in the tools for search and replace in SourceSafe.

Just so you know it: AbaPerls is command-line only. There is no GUI.

To read more about AbaPerls, move on to the AbaPerls manual and read the introduction.

To download AbaPerls go to the download page. The current version of AbaPerls is L1.0.0190.

Please direct any questions about AbaPerls to Erland Sommarskog directly on my private address esquel@sommarskog.se.