More SSDT Changes

I just realized after an exchange on Twitter that I had not posted about the recent announcements about the recent changes to SSDT!

Previously I posted about the split of the Business Intelligence projects from SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) into SSDT-BI when CTP1 of SQL Server 2014 was released in June. As I mentioned back then I thought this was a strange idea that SSDT needed to be split up this way since we had BIDS (Business Intelligence Development Studio) back in the SQL Server 2005/2008 days and when SQL Server 2012 was coming out they changed that name to SSDT and added the database projects to it as well as all of the BI projects (SSAS, SSIS and SSRS). Now, with SQL Server 2014 it looks like the teams at Microsoft have again decided that these tools need to be split up even with some of the database project functions being included with Visual Studio 2013 at release.

I don't know about any of the behind the scenes stuff that might be going on at Microsoft related to this, but just be aware with SQL Server 2014 there are 2 separate tools and neither of them will be included in the installer (at least as of the last few weeks of posts that I have seen on the Microsoft blogs). You will have to download SSDT and/or SSDT-BI separately from the web. Also there is even more confusion over what you are able to have integrated into the different versions of Visual Studio with Visual Studio 2013 now available.

To help clear up the picture a bit, check out this blog post from Matt Masson from the Microsoft SSIS team: http://www.mattmasson.com/2013/10/sql-server-data-tools-business-intelligence-downloads/. This picture should get much clearer in the next months as SQL Server 2014 is finally released. Also, here is a good post from the SQL Server Blog that also gives all of the download links for SSDT and SSDT-BI as it stands right now: http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2013/11/13/microsoft-sql-server-data-tools-update.aspx.

As always I will keep up with all of the news around SSDT and SSDT-BI as I use those tools a lot today and I'm very curious how it will all work with SQL Server 2014 and on.