Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals, to be released to manufacture on Nov. 30, is one of the four modules comprising the company's Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition suite of developer tools.

"There are people building apps and people building databases. Depending on your organization, they can be warring tribes," said Cameron Skinner, product manager for the Database Professionals software. "We are trying to solve the collaboration problem and give folks some tooling to get control over their database schema changes."

Skinner said the tool can help database administrators visually compare data and then generate scripts to easily move it from one place to another. For database developers "slinging T-SQL code, writing triggers and such, they will also find lots of good things here," he said.

Skinner said the tool and the Visual Studio suite is unique among the large database vendors. "Oracle and IBM have point solutions, but not something that is part of an overall software lifecycle management suite," he said.

He also said the software, which lists for US$5,000 per user license, should be easy to learn. "If you've never seen Visual Studio, there's a learning curve, but it should be easy for .Net and Visual Studio programmers," he said.