Product articles

Dashboard doc with xp

We don’t need no documentation – automating schema docs in SQL Change Automation

“Understanding the existing product consumes roughly 30 percent of the total maintenance time.” Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. You should be documenting your database schema. I know it, you know it. Having current, accurate documentation available accelerates time-to-resolution for faults, aids tech-to-business conversations, and is a regulatory requirement for a great number of firms. Read more
screenshot of a drift report from sql change

Dealing with production database drift

For the SQL Change Automation team, it’s important that we take time out from development, occasionally, to explore some of the issues our customers face when automating database deployment. Following on from previous posts about cross-database and cross-server dependencies, this article shares some of our thoughts about how to deal with production database drift. If you’re Read more
Pipeline Screenshot

Monitoring your database schemas with pipelines

DLM Dashboard tracks changes to your database schemas across different environments. In this blog post, we’ll talk about organizing your databases into pipelines, and how this can help you to better understand your workflow. How was it organized before? Grouping databases by category In the first version of DLM Dashboard, databases were grouped by category Read more

Quick extended properties with SQL Prompt

I’ve been experimenting with Extended Properties, and I found myself slightly annoyed by the syntax of adding and updating Extended Properties. I decided to take advantage of SQL Prompt to store the commonly used code for adding and updating properties. Adding Properties I’m a big fan of naming the snippets the first thing that comes to mind. Read more

Transaction-handling techniques in T-SQL deployments

How are transaction handled when deploying databases with SQL Change Automation? For the most part, we have resisted putting excess structure around the way that changes are deployed to your database. Unlike database projects that use the declarative-style of deployment, which work by synchronizing a source-controlled model of your schema to a target database, we Read more