Red Gate’s upcoming product DLM Dashboard (formerly SQL Lighthouse) gives you the What, the Who, the When and the How of database “drift” so you can make things right.

A few months ago I wrote a post about a new product we are creating at Red Gate called DLM Dashboard. Our goal is to help database professionals with one of their most frustrating and time-consuming tasks; quickly identifying and resolving database “drift”. Database drift is where the state of a database has moved away from its expected or desired state over time, and it’s usually a bad thing. This can happen for a number of reasons; here are a few of the most common we’ve come across during our research:

• An emergency hotfix is applied to a database at short notice
• A client makes bespoke changes to their installation of the product
• Someone who has permission to change a Production environment makes, what they consider to be, a “quick, risk-free change”

These types of changes can be disruptive and damaging if they are made without the knowledge or involvement of a DBA or otherwise circumnavigate a business’s established database deployment process. Even when drift doesn’t cause a problem at the time, it can come back and bite you during your next deployment. For example the next deployment might undo an emergency hotfix that was made directly on production.

What will DLM Dashboard do for you?

We’re building DLM Dashboard to better equip you, the database professional, to identify and respond to damaging drift. It will track your database schemas, continually looking out for changes. It will then notify you of any change and give you valuable information about the changes – specifically what, who, when and how:

• What objects have changed – which tables, procedures, indexes, etc.
• Who changed them – the user logged-in when the SQL was executed
• When they changed them – the time the SQL was executed
• How they were changed – the SQL ran to make the modification and the tool used

Equipped with the What, the Who, the When and the How, database professionals will be able to get to the bottom of any schema change and go about the process of making things right. That remedial action is at the discretion of the individual, but it might be one of the following:

• Rollback the change because it was made incorrectly or by mistake
• Apply the change to other environments to get them all up-to-date
• Script the change into version control to get it back in-line with established process

Where are we with DLM Dashboard?

Over the last couple of months, the DLM Dashboard Team at Red Gate have been working with a small number of users to shape the product so it would be useful in a real-life SQL Server environment. This was our alpha phase and it’s been absolutely invaluable. I’d like to take this opportunity to say a big THANK YOU to the awesome DBAs, database developers and consultants who’ve dedicated time to trying out the tool and giving us some great feedback – both positive and constructive.

We’re now ready to announce that we’ll be releasing a public beta next month so that everyone can get their hands on the tool and put it through its paces. It’s still relatively early days for DLM Dashboard, so there is still lots of work for us to do and our beta users will identify issues and missing features.

For the public beta release we are focussing on notifying users of schema changes and equipping them with the What, the Who, the When and the How of changes. In the future, we hope to add the capability to take action to resolve drift within the product. For instance, we may invoke Red Gate’s SQL Compare product to apply a change to another environment or roll it back. We also hope to integrate the product with our new automation tools for database continuous delivery.

Join the public beta!

If you are interested in trying out DLM Dashboard and want to be notified when the beta release is out, sign-up at www.red-gate.com/products/dlm/dlm-dashboard/ or use the form below and start watching your inbox!