Gulf Coast Seal Ltd., a Houston-based distributor of industrial products for energy producers, used beta versions of Visual Studio for Database Professionals to revamp its SQL Server 2005-based data warehouse, Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process and business reports.

Previously, according to Jeff Lynch, e-commerce manager at Gulf Coast Seal, changes were done "ad-hoc, without the benefit of source control, unit testing or any proper build procedure. If we forgot to backup the test database and changed something which broke several functions and sprocs, it took hours and hours to find and fix."

Using the software, Gulf Coast was able to create an offline copy of its database and set up a "sandbox" area for development and testing, sharply cutting deployment time, Lynch said.