How to place BIDS solutions under source control?

Question

I am starting to work with Microsoft BI: Analysis Services 2005, Business Intelligence Development Studio 2005, such things. Of course, my first wish was to set up the same version control / automated test environment as for my .NET projects.

But the xml files used by Analysiss services (dwproj, cube, dim, ds, dsv) and integration services (dtsx) are most likely uncontrollable. They not only have actual data mixed with presentation details, for example. charts, but they are also often reformatted when saved using Visual Studio. This leads to completely useless differences in TortoiseSVN, where half of the file has changed, but you cannot figure out where and why.

How do you solve this problem? Are there any special systems / plugins suitable for working?

Answer 1

We have a BIDS Helper feature (a free open source add-on) that performs "smart diff". We cannot stop all the reformatting that continues, but the smart diff function cuts out as much of the presentation details as we can, which usually allows you to see the important details of any changes. I know this works with Source Safe and TFS, I don’t know if anyone else tried with SVN.