VS2010 database project deploy rebuilds every table

Question

I have recently created a database project in VS2010 for an existing SQL Server 2008 R2 DB. I have updated 1 table out of 11 by adding 3 new columns to the end. I then updated 4 views that referred to that table.

I then tried a Build/Deploy with it only generating a script.

I have inspected the script and for every single table in the DB, it has generated code that will create a temp version of each table, copy the data from the existing table, drop the original and rename the copy.

I saw the posting on here where it insisted on rebuilding the table for dropped columns and I tried setting the IgnoreColumnOrder but it didn't make any difference. It didn't seem relevant to my situation, anyway, so I wasn't surprised.

I created my DB project by getting the DBA to give me a fully scripted version of Production, built that DB on my PC version of SQL Server and then created my initial project from that. I don't think that would make any difference and I have compared the project definition of the tables to the target Dev DB and they are the same.

I have "Always recreate database" unticked and "Block incremental deployment if data loss might occur" ticked. Don't suppose they have anything to do with my issue?

Any ideas?

Answer 1

I found a backup of the database and as per Peter's suggestion, ran a Schema Compare. The difference turned out to be that the target DB had PAGE compression on most of the tables but that was not in the project definition.