SQL Type Providers and Continuous Integration with FAKE

If you want to access a relational database from an F# (or C#) application, SQL F# type providers are commonly used. SQL type providers will provide all the types, properties and methods needed to access and interact with the tables of a SQL database, without having to write any extra boilerplate code. Everything is type checked and if the actual database schema gets out of synch with the database related code, compilation will fail. This is very valuable because it gives you high confidence in the application's data access code.

So at compile time the database has to be up to date and accessible. But how does this work in a continuous integration environment? Off course an option is to have the connection string of the type provider point to a development database on the network. Another solution would be to manually create or update a database on the build server before the build. But I don't really like this because I think the build server should be independent and self-sufficient. A solution to this scenario, that worked for me, is to deploy the database during the build process using Visual Studio database projects and FAKE - F# Make.

There might be other and maybe better solutions that I haven't come up with. I'd be curious to find out. Actually this might be one. The approach that I used, however, works out nicely, so I will give a quick walkthrough on how to set things up.

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