Your strategy for loading a freshly built database with data will depend on how much you need. If just a few rows, then single-row INSERT statements will be fine, but for more than that you'll need to build insert the rows using native-format BCP. Fortunately, SQL Change Automation (SCA) can be used with either strategy, as Phil Factor demonstrates. Read more
Whichever way you wish to ensure that a database, when built, has all the data that will enable it to function properly, there are reasonably simple ways of doing it. Phil Factor explains the alternatives. Read more
Phil Factor demonstrates the bare essentials of SCA PowerShell scripts that can form the basis for an automated process for database delivery or help improve your current process. Read more
Phil Factor demonstrates how to integrate SQL Change Automation into containerized workflows, such as are typical of a microservices architecture. He shows how to automate database builds into a Linux SQL Server container running on Windows, and then backup the containerized database and restore it into dedicated containerized development copies for each developer and tester. Read more
John Morehouse describes how a quest to help solve his organization's "deployment bottleneck" led them to a place where they could both deliver application and database changes into the wild at a pace to satisfy customer demand, and achieve a better work-life balance for the team, both of which are well worth having. Read more
Faris Hilmi presents the highlights of the latest SQL Prompt 9.5 release, including SSMS 18 and VS 2019 support, schema filtering for code completion suggestions, new code analysis auto-fixes and more. Read more
A monitoring tool must provide us with an understanding of the often-complex performance patterns that databases exhibit when under load, so that we can predict how they will cope with expansion or increase in scale. It must also helps us spot the symptoms of stress and act before they become problems that affect the service, and understand better what was happening within a database when an intermittent problem started. Read more
Faris Hilmi introduces the new Estate pages in SQL Monitor 9, which provide estate-wide views of disk space usage, backups and other jobs, and application of recent SQL Server updates and patches. Using them, a team can review the overall health of all their servers and databases, identify potential issues before they escalate into real problems, and assign priorities, proactively. Read more
If we know how a database is likely to be attacked, we can arrange our lines of defense, and install the monitors required to detect any attempts. However, some types of attack are difficult to imagine, so we also need our monitoring tool to be adaptable, so that it can collect a more diffuse collection of metrics, and then help us determine the reason for any sudden change in the patterns of access . Read more
Phil Factor shows how a set of Redgate tools can be used together, via PowerShell, to build a database from object-level source, stock it with data, document it, and then provision any number of test and development servers. Before tearing down and rebuilding a database to a new version, we take care to save any DDL changes made to the existing copy. Read more
Compliant Database DevOps
