Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) aims to provide a roadmap of what is required, and when, to deliver and maintain effective databases that can respond quickly to business change. How does the DevOps movement, as it applies to databases, fit into this? William Brewer explains how DevOps provides the organisational change between delivery and operations to make important parts of the process easier to introduce.… Read more
On both Windows and Linux, the chore of setting up developer workstations can take several days, and there always seem to be a few configuration settings that get missed. You can reduce the time and tedium dramatically by automating the process by using Vagrant to set up the operating system, followed by your choice of provisioning, configuration management and orchestration applications such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, Docker, Chocolatey and Boxstarter. Vishwas shows how to make it easy to do with Vagrant, Chocolatey and Boxstarter.… Read more
Database provisioning for development work isn't always easy. The better that development teams meet business demands for rapid delivery and high quality, the more complex become the requirements for the work of development and testing. More databases are required for testing and development, and they need to be more rapidly kept current. Data and loading needs to match more closely what is in production. Grant Fritchey explains.… Read more
For many developers, database security and Access control is just something that gets in the way of development work. However, several recent security breaches have had devastating consequences and have caused a change in attitude about the value to any organisation of having database applications that meet industry standards for access control and security. The problem, however is in admitting that you have a problem and finding answers to those problems you are just too shy to ask in public. … Read more
Even a database development framework like Sql Server Data Tools (SSDT) doesn't get it right all the time, and there are ten deployment 'gotchas' in particular that can cause some head-scratching amongst developers to get right. From his unique perspective of creating a tool to make such deployments in SSDT less stressful, Dan Nolan discusses each pitfall and how to avoid it, whether you have ReadyRoll or not. … Read more
There is a great gulf between wanting to document your database properly with extended properties and actually doing it. Extended Properties have many uses but they aren't easy to use. Phil Factor is on a mission to make it easier for ordinary mortals to use extended properties as intended, to aid the database development process.… Read more
Master Data Services (MDS) is Microsoft's platform for supporting Master Data Management (MDM). A system like MDS, if properly maintained, gives organisations a powerful alternative to increasingly having to centralize databases as a way of preventing data from getting out sync or become inconsistent, and a reliable way of managing the flow of data through corporate IT systems. It makes microservice architectures realistic. Hari Yadav shows you how to get up and running with MDS. … Read more
So many of the problems that organisations have with their IT applications are due to the struggle with data, in the absence of overall organization-wide control and supervision of data and its progress through the various parts of the organization. Master data management (MDM) offers a solution to the many data woes by controlling data change, It does it in an analogous way to Version Control, so that changes are cleansed, checked, tracked and audited, and any named version can be published to other services . Now Microsoft has an implementation as part of the data platform.… Read more
When it comes to releasing and delivering an Entity Framework application, you will be faced with the problem of deploying it to several delivery environments such as test or staging as part of the delivery pipeline. How do you cope with managing, error-free, all the environment-specific settings that are entailed? Why not use transformations? Sudha explains how.… Read more
Windows Server 2016 features support for containers. These are not Linux-based, but containers that run on Windows and run Windows on the inside.
These conform to the Open Container Initiative (OCI). They allow you to run applications insulated from the rest of the system, within portable containers that include everything an application needs to be fully functional. As they did with Linux, containers will change the nature of the software supply chain for Windows users.… Read more
Although it is well-known that the best efforts of a development team can be derailed by mistakes in the architecture, design and general governance of a development project, few attempts have been made to describe what needs to be done to increase the chances of success in the development of a database application. William Brewer steps into the breach to itemise what a delivery team needs to succeed.… Read more
Knut Jürgensen shares his experiences, both positive and negative, with regard to the function that Master Data Management fulfils within a company. Too often this critical aspect of a business is overlooked or pushed aside without paying it the attention it deserves based on the cost benefits available.… Read more
By placing under source control everything we need to describe any version of a database, we make it much easier to achieve consistent database builds and releases, to find out who made which changes and why, and to access all database support materials. Matthew Skelton explains how to make sure your version control system fully supports all phases of the database lifecycle, from governance, development, delivery and through to operations.… Read more
With database deployments, not all script-based processes are equal. Some use change scripts in a free-and-easy way, and some, which are normally called 'migrations-based approaches', have more discipline around them. In this article, Redgate Product Manager Elizabeth Ayer covers 'migrations', and shows some of the benefits that have come with new tooling which is specifically designed to assist the change script processes.… Read more
Few databases are self-contained. They take data from other sources, and publish them to downstream consumers of data. These ETL processes tend to grow in an unplanned organic way and so tand to cause trouble both in production and in deployment. Database Lifecycle Management systems allow all the teams to come together to ensure that ETL systems meet all requirements.… Read more
It should be simple to upgrade a database to a new version. It certainly can be, but if you need to preserve the existing data and you have made changes to the design to the tables then it can get complicated. If you are deploying changes to a heavily-used OLTP system on which an organization depends, then you need to understand, and be familiar with, the issues that can effect a database migration. Matthew Skelton explains the basic approaches.… Read more
Any database development project will be hard to manage without a system for reporting bugs in the code, anomalies and incidents from live environments, and for keeping track of new features. Matthew Skelton discusses the critical role of an integrated issue tracking system in database lifecycle management.… Read more
The purpose of a database build is simple: prove that what you have in version control can successfully create a working database. And yet many teams struggle with unreliable and untested database build processes that slow down deployments and prevent the delivery of new functionality. Grant Fritchey explains how to achieve an automated and reliable database build that is only as complex as the database system it needs to create.… Read more
When you use AdventureWorks as a practice database, have you ever looked at the code and thought 'what idiot did this', or 'what did the DBAs think when they saw that?' Subconsciously, you occasionally forget it isn't real and 'fill in the back-story'. The SQL Release Team at Redgate did the same with their own practice database, and imagined a cast of characters wrestling with the difficulties of deploying it.… Read more
Continuous integration (CI) is becoming more and more common in application development. It ensures code and related resources are integrated regularly and tested by an automated build system, and highlights problems early in the development process. But what about database development? Can the same advantages of CI be applied to production databases? Where do you start? How do you tackle it? Sjors Takes relates his experience.… Read more
