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
It’s been four years since Redgate’s first SQL in the City and in that time we’ve hosted the event 16 times in a range of cities. It’s become something of a well-oiled machine and I’m pretty confident we’ve got the dynamic down to a ‘tea’. What I most look forward to is seeing everyone... Read more
It’s a familiar story. Two developers are working on a database, they’re using version control, and there’s a problem. The bigger problem is, they don’t even know they have a problem. As far as they’re concerned, they’re doing everything right. They’ve been using version control, so they can deploy the database changes they’ve been... Read more
When devising the first workshop for the new Redgate DLM training program, Steve Jones and I got into a bit of a debate about branching. Upon reflection, it’s obvious why. People often use the term ‘release branch’, but they can mean different things. It is important to be clear. I did some Googling and... Read more
For a long time, SQL Compare has been the industry standard for comparing and deploying SQL Server database schemas. Packed with features that can be used to maintain a history of deployments, it makes it possible to build up a record of which objects were changed, when a change was applied, who made it,... Read more
