Finding External References in Database Deployments

This article outlines the syntax of the three and four dot references that usually denote external database references, demonstrates how to find them either from a live database or by using a text search of a script, and explains some of the complicating factors that can lead to 'false positives'. Read more

Database Branching and Merging without the Tears

Armed with a schema comparison engine and an object-level directory of the source for every recent version of the database, you'll be able to remove a lot of the uncertainty around merging database changes back into development. Read more

Working with Flyway And Entity Framework Code First: An Overview

This article presents an approach to database development and deployment that combines the strengths of Entry Framework Code First for .NET-driven development with the control and database versioning provided by Flyway's SQL migrations. It allows every database change to be reviewed and tested for integrity, performance, and stability in the same way as any application change. It should make a Database CI process much easier to sustain. Read more

How to Automate Cross-Platform Database Development

In order to focus on their primary task of developing databases, the development team need to automate as many as possible of the routine tasks that are essential for database delivery, such as testing, scripting, version control, documentation, code review, reporting and so on. This article gives some advice on how to do it, faced with the added challenge of needing to use several different relational databases. Read more

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: Tab Coloring

The Tab Coloring component of SQL Prompt’s SSMS Tab management could save you from accidentally doing something apocalyptic on a production server, ever again. Read more

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: SQL History

Mistakes occasionally happen. Sometimes you accidentally close an SSMS query tab without saving it, before realizing it contained an essential bit of code. Occasionally, you make some ill-judged 'refinements' to working code and now just wish you could rewind your tab back in time an hour and forget the whole sorry episode. Now and again, SSMS just conspires against you and crashes unexpectedly, and you lose all your currently open query tabs, some of which you hadn't saved. SQL History offers a useful safety net in the event of any of these unfortunate events. Read more

Automatically Tracking and Deploying Static Data in Flyway Enterprise

Static data is often required for the basic functioning of a database and any dependent applications. Therefore, it's vital that we can track this static data to understand how, when, and why it changed, and that we include any static data changes in our database deployments. Flyway Enterprise will now do both tasks automatically. Read more

Piping, Filtering and Using Flyway Output in PowerShell

Flyway's output is often overwhelmed with verbose messages, most of which we can ignore but some of which provide vital warnings about failed compilations, or useful details about what a migration or callback did. I'll show how to use some pipeline-aware PowerShell functions to filter out and save the bits we want and pass the results along in a form that is useful to the next process in the pipeline. Read more

Finding and Tuning Expensive Stored Procedures using SQL Monitor

SQL Monitor's Top procedures list makes it simple to find the procedures having the biggest impact on performance, allowing you to prioritize your tuning efforts, reduce risk and keep pace with the requirements of your growing database estate. Read more

Improving the Quality of your Database Monitoring

Database monitoring should be as simple as possible, and yet still allow the users to drill into sufficient detail to be able to recommend a fix to the problem. The trick is to adopt a layered or 'tiered' approach. Read more

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