VSTS Overview Followup - Does DB Refactoring use Dependencies?

Last week at VSLive! I was asked this good question:

I was wondering how the dependencies for refactoring were taken care of in the Database Pro application? I am asking only in relation to how your application works and if we should look out for anything funky when using it here at work and my request has nothing whatever to do with my side project. -Eddie Merkel

I thought others might have this question, so I wanted to post the reply from Gert Drapers: We parse all SQL ourselves, and interpret it next to build up the dependency graphs. This way we have column level dependencies, where SQL Server only knows about object level dependencies. SQL Server is adding functionality in SQL Server 2008 to fix up the dependency information after it has been broken, but you will only be getting object level dependencies, which is fine and good enough for scripting out objects,, but not for refactoring like we do. I hope this answers your question. -GertD

Gert's blog is a great place to get info on DB Tools: https://blogs.msdn.com/gertd. Gert is the Group Manager for this team and has a tremendously deep knowledge of both SQL and his product.

Thanks!

Steph