title: Best practices for database development in Visual Studio 2010?
body: <p>I'm starting a new, large server based project using .Net 4 and Visual Studio 2010. I've done this many times before (with various versions), but I've never found a good way to maintain my database. There's been a lot of new technologies in the past few years to make this easier. However, there is one thing I haven't found: A technology/framework that can automatically <strong>update</strong> a database based on a model, without regenerating the entire thing and losing all the data. Can anyone point me in the direction of anything like that?</p>
  
  <p>If not, can anyone point me in the direction of best practices for such development? We've got one development DB, one test DB and a production DB. I would like to be able to just run some auto generated script or code to update a database according to the latest model. I know that certain changes are harder to track than others, but at the moment about 95% of changes to the schema are added tables or columns. Those changes should be possible to auto generate script for - right?</p>
  
  <p>Any help in helping me get this database off to a good start will be much appreciated! </p>