Time to start!
Annabel Bradford (Head of Events at Redgate) comes out on stage.
Intro
Annabel takes the stage and for me she is the face of Redgate at PASS, what better person to kick off the Redgate Keynote! Annabel has been a Redgater for 15 years and is the “Head of Events” at Redgate – why am I not surprised! 14th PASS Summit.
New building gets a shout out. It is incredible indeed!
Yesterday 98 sessions, 50 clinic meetings, and lots of networking
Another 79 sessions today!
Let’s be honest, as data geeks, most of use are just a little bit different. We appreciate you bringing your authentic self, even if you are from another part of the world or use other data platforms – “we embrace you” seems to be message at PASS. 45% are first timers!
So much going on, get out there and connect, share and learn!
Redgate is the proud host of the PASS Summit!
Keynote: Simplifying Complexity: making the database work in the real world
Kellyn Gorman, Advocate and Engineer at Redgate
Kellyn is the weird Oracle girl that we embraced. (her words!) Kellyn Gorman has an expansive history working with Oracle, and what better person to support Redgate’s customers that support Oracle workloads?! Joined in 2012 by attending a SQLSaturday! Worked at Microsoft as an Oracle SME.
Newest Redgate Advocate!
Multi-platform is the norm
More and more people are multi-platform. But security is always a concern.
Big stat that stands out to me. 61% have security concerns… Really only 21%.
Stats that show that many many organizations are having a lot of difficulty getting proper data to test and work with.
Find your village and the right tools, because environments are complex. Love this AI slide because it is messy, and it makes you wonder if it was on purpose.
“We don’t want to be that person running into the cyclist”
We adapt. DBA roles aren’t going anywhere, but teams will realign roles.
Graham McMIllan, Chief Technology Officer Redgate enters the stage, Kellyn leaves.
Case for Change
Previously managing systems. One of the systems Graham managed had 30,000 SQL Servers and it was brittle. So, the goal is to find ways to make it less brittle and get more done.
Archana Venkatraman, Senior Director of IDC Europe, enters the stage with Graham
Digital tech spending outpaces global economy seven times faster than the global economy.
Delivery excellence is defined by four strategic priorities:
Speed, Quality, Efficiency, and Productivity
Hard to do with regulations and shrinking budgets!
What is holding back Business and DevOps Success?
Technical debt is holding us back. (Something I have harped on for 25 years talking about database design… it all comes back to bite you!)
3.5 hours is the average hours for DBA to deploy databases. I assume this is to deploy changes. Database changes considered the biggest bottleneck. Database dev done in a silo from developers. (Editor’s note: some of this is explained by DBAs trying to avoid technical debt!
Hard to rollback changes, which causes bottlenecks, but undoing mistakes takes a LOT of time!)
Messy Middle.
Some form of digital impasse not being able to navigate many of the challenges.
Security and compliance is always an issue. Return on investment is always a concern, which really doesn’t play well with the security and compliance needs.
Change management is basically hard, and how do we get out of this messy middle? In these terms the messy middle is evolving DevOps, data governance, heterogeneity, and of course, the ongoing operational challenges.
Share the pain, bring the teams together. 70% of IDC employees are in tech, and just 2% are DBAs. Like a 1-35 ratio of programmer to employee. That is a stark number, honestly.
Six core data desires
We need to empower the DBAs to get the work done as part of the team
Resilience and Innovation are two competing needs we have
Archana leaves the stage and Arneh Eskandari, Director of Solutions Engineering and Danny de Haan, Product Architect, Database Management for APG, enter.
APC Discussion
Pensioner company in the Netherlands. 4.6 million covered members!
They don’t just have an eye for money. They strive to provide a good pension and good value to the work.
Discussing how they used to do business 5 years ago. Lots of silos, teams complexly separate with lot so separation between teams. Things like GDPR, forced change.
Fast forward to today, new infrastructure-as-code process. As a financial company, lots of different regulations to deal with.
New tools used to give them a single pane of glass view for their developers.
Infrastructure through Blueprinting
DevOps teams create blueprints for teams, they can provision databases, servers, etc.
Easy to use, independent, efficient, compliant and secure by design.
Balance of ease of use and compliance is amazingly important.
Advice for the audience
Align your company, so they are all working together. Especially the DevOps team.
Choose whether to build or by (they built), but when you buy, make sure it is flexible.
You can build the nicest castle on a hilltop, but if they want a modern glass house with an infinity pool, they will not want it!
Kellyn and Graham return
Kellyn: DevOps is essential. We are expected to do more with less.
State of the Database Landscape Highlights
2500+ people responded to the survey. Here are some early results.
Three major issues: efficiency, innovations, and security. Graham is asking Kellyn what they all mean.
Improve Efficiency: Means uptime. Never goes down (Kellyn jokes no users would help!)
Innovation: Patching, updates, but we don’t want to make changes. Testing, performing, security, correctness.
Security: DBAs are VERY concerned about security.
A Taster of Results:
74% of IT teams multi-platform
25% are using more than one platform.
The natural life of the database is growth
18% of people are making DAILY changes. DAILY. I wonder what those changes are? New columns?
50% increase in short notice changes.
Two type of orgs emerge, rapid changers, and those who take a longer time to make changes.
DB-Engines Overview
Great site to show what database engines are being used. Now owned by Redgate.
Flyway
Supports over 50 different types of database platform EVEN in the community version, not including Cassandra and others.
Redgate Monitor
2024 we added Deeper PostgreSQL functionality Also includes Cassandra, Clickhouse and Data Bricks!
In 2025,will be able to be deployed completely on Linux on Oracle and PostgreSQL (Timescale)
Test Data Manager
PII Masking, optimizing test data with smart sub setting. Powers DevOps with ephemeral instances (I had to look it up too!)
Back to the Messy Middle
Mostly cloud, 2023 -2024 less people are Mostly Cloud or ALL Cloud. All on-premises increased as well.
Theory is that there are maybe large systems that need the control and management to deal with the huge requirements.
Other cases were probably costs by not understanding the costs, and not creating the applications for the cloud in the first place. So some regression may have occurred.
Announcement: Redgate products Flyway, Monitor, and Test Data Manager
Now available from the cloud marketplaces!
Single biggest challenge we face
Graham asks the audience, how they feel that each of these is holding them back:
- Security: Did not get a lot of hands
- Skillset: a few
- Data Integration: Biggest set of hands.
- Monitoring: a few
Biggest was skillset concerns in the survey. Of course we are all at a conference, so it is less of an issue here. There were several people who did say they were here on PTO
The survey said…
- Security: 36%
- Skillset: 53%
- Data Integration: 49%
- Monitoring and troubleshooting: 43%
Kellyn leaves the stage. James Henson, Senior Product Manager at Redgate, enters.
Be Secure
36% of people said security stops multi-platform adoption. People can’t use the new innovations because of security concerns.
Redgate Monitor Enterprise helps with some of these things. For example, lots of questions about who can do what with your data. Who has admin access, etc.
Demo: Redgate Monitor
User Permissions
You can see who has access to what. Sees what Graham has access to. Too much. Benefits of being the CTO 😊
Having this information gives you streamlines visibility to make sure you have proper security.
Enabling innovation with AI
AI delivers improved productivity… educing time on DB deployment, amplify the signal in the noise.
Dynamic alerting
Demo showing that you can set alerts to a threshold in Test Data Manager, so you don’t get alerts that are normal at one time but concerning later.
Need for collaboration
Operations feel that change is risk, devs want to keep changing. But there is this feeling that devs are throwing stuff at DBAs. DevOps is supposed to bring these teams together
Test Data Manager/AI powered Test Data Generation
Shows how you can generate test data that is both fake and realistic enough. This machine learning models are run only on your environments
Rules based data gen where you give the tool rules and data sets, and you can integrate with AI to generate the edge sets.
Data looks real, and your data stays yours and is not sent out.
If you want to know more, scan here!
James Henson leaves the stage
What are you going to do next!
When you get back to the office, ideally you will Monitor, Automate, and Protect:
Ideally using Redgate tools, naturally!
Closing
Arne and Annabel return to the stage
Thank you to all of the speakers this morning!
Pass Summit is back here in November 17-21
NEW FOR 2025, smaller PASS branded events in NYC, Dallas and Amsterdam coming up!
Probably too late if you are reading blog, but at the booth they had this adorable stuff stuffed aardvark you could win to commemorate our first product that was called “Aardvark”, this to commemorate that Redgate has been around for 25 years now!
Thank you!
Big thanks to Scott Stauffer and Rodney Kidd for their help with the text, pictures, etc!
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