Interesting the stuff you pick up from reading forums…
“The BATCH seperators [in SSDT deployment scripts] are used to provide scoping when resolving object shapes. SSDT or VSDB scripts for that matter serve a different purpose, they provide the blueprint of the model you want, and do not represent how it will be used to construct the target site. We choose TSQL as our DSL, at first we wanted to use a different representation, but user research in 2005 told us loud and clear users wanted to use TSQL as their DSL. In order to make the compiler work, we had to impose some simplifications, one is a more frequent use of BATCH seperators to indentify object scopes.”
by Gert Drapers (former lead of the SSDT product team) at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ssdt/thread/47d4124b-82cd-48f9-8ba7-c2ae4c73cbcf/
Personally I’m glad that they chose to use T-SQL as it makes debugging easier but I’d be interested to know what else was on the table!
@Jamiet