It has always been a difficult task to provision development and test environments so that they reflect as closely as possible what’s present in production. With the rise of containerization and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) technologies, some parts of this are becoming much easier. We can automate the process of spinning up and configuring new virtual Read more
You want to run some database tests but you can’t use real production data because it contains personal data, including customer names, addresses, and so on. However, you do need to develop and test the database with data that reflects reasonably accurately the nature of your customer data. How do you generate data that gives Read more
For .NET developers working with Visual Studio (VS), the introduction of Database Projects with SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) brought to VS the ability to manage changes to the database schema and code objects, just like any other type of application code. An added advantage is that the declarative style of SSDT’s project files lends itself Read more
I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time as a racing driver, racing BMWs for three years before joining the BRSCC Porsche Championship. Steve McQueen famously said ‘Racing is life. Anything before or after is just waiting’. When I’m waiting, I’m a SQL Server DBA consultant and throughout my racing and DBA career, I’ve realised Read more
Often during my development work, especially at the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) stage, I need a quick and easy way to save my current progress, for example, by updating a set of object build scripts in a directory. Ultimately, I also need a way to compare my current development database or script directory to a target production Read more
Some SQL coding habits are just annoying. Commas in front of column names? No way! Others are actively harmful; they’ll make your code error prone, harder for others to read and understand, and even harder to edit without making mistakes. This article covers five harmful problems that I see regularly in T-SQL code, and shows Read more
As a database developer, I use SQL Compare extensively during the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) phase of my projects, when I’m trying out new ideas and developing code on my local machine. I need to start from an up-to-date database schema from the production database, and have a simple way to keep track of my database schema Read more
SQL Prompt includes a number of snippets by default that can help you quickly write T-SQL code. These are templates of code that users use regularly. One of the more popular snippets is the “ii” snippet that helps with inserting data into a table. If I type “ii” and hit tab, I quickly get the Read more
A while ago, maintaining a reliable database change history was an ongoing problem within our development team. It seemed we were forever asking questions such as “Who made this change?”, “When was the stored procedure last edited?”, “When was this view created?”, and so on. Our initial approach was simply to store a list of Read more
Any database developer or DBA who spends much of their working week staring at SQL code quickly becomes set in their ways. They like to see the code laid out in a very particular way. They will struggle to look at, let alone digest and understand, code formatted in a ‘foreign’ style. It’s also rare Read more
Compliant Database DevOps
