Deploying database changes to new environments is a very stressful activity. Many organizations and their employees dread migrating changes to a production database because of the potential for problems or downtime. There are ways to minimize the potential issues and build more reliable deployment processes. In fact, many organizations do this, but they do... Read more
In this post, we take a big step forward in engineering the database development process by looking at Continuous Integration (CI) for your database and the characteristics of a software pipeline that begins to implement a repeatable process. This is the S3 stage, named for, and characterized by, the use of CI. S3 –... Read more
In my last post, I looked at the first stage of our maturity model, the Manual level. In this post we move to the S2 level, which is characterized by the use of a formal Version Control System (VCS) and process. S2 – Automated Version Control Many software development organizations have implemented a VCS... Read more
At Redgate Software, we’ve been trying to build tools that help developers work with software better. One of our areas of focus in the last few years has been streamlining database development and deployment. To help customers migrate to a smoother workflow and a better engineered software development pipeline, we’ve built our own maturity... Read more
One of the ways in which many software development teams have tried to improve the quality of their output is by examining what has worked in other organizations and projects in the past. They look to experiment with new techniques and ideas, and implement those items that work. This practice has allowed Agile, Scrum,... Read more
Test automation is a major part of the testing effort conducted at Redgate, and all our teams work hard to continuously improve existing practices. In this post, I’ll describe one of the problems we faced – and our approach for solving it. Scenario: A set of UI automated tests with Selenium were not trustable.... Read more
During the development of SQL Prompt 7, we overhauled the snippet manager to make it more powerful and customizable. The snippet manager documentation lives here but there are some subtleties that I wanted to cover in in this post. Everyone writes SQL differently and we want SQL Prompt to work with your current workflow... Read more
Had I ever been asked the question “What animal would you like to be and why?” (apparently it was a common interview brainteaser), I would have answered “A penguin”. I like water, I also like sardines. I don’t care much for flying (in fact, the older I get, the more frightening a prospect that... Read more
In our latest release, we sped up ReadyRoll’s performance more than x10 on large databases in two key areas of the product: script generation and project packaging. If you are new to a codebase and haven’t done any performance work on the application before, it is a good idea to get a big, bad... Read more
Reliability, traceability, speed: these are the top three motivators for automating the deployment of database changes. Especially when it comes to production, there is no compromising on the level of scrutiny that may just prevent something disastrous happening in production. This need for quality has a strange effect. We talked recently to 30 teams at various stages... Read more
