The Customer

Masterminds Group brings DevOps, Data, and Analytics together to transform raw data from static storage into strategic capital that fuels growth. They operate mission-critical Microsoft data and analytics platforms for customers around the world. As a Microsoft Data Platform consultancy and managed services provider, their engineers focus on SQL Server, Azure business intelligence and modern cloud data platforms.

Their aim is to meet their customers where they are, by understanding that every organization is at a different stage of data maturity. Their experts operate worldwide. With established teams in the Netherlands, UK, Germany, Portugal, and Sweden, they combine global reach with local presence.

They don’t deliver a one-size-fits-all package; they pinpoint exactly where their customers stand. From there, they determine the best route. 
Their three domains: Data, Analytics, and DevOps, work seamlessly together to guide customers to achieve their goal.

The Challenge

The Masterminds Group relied on a largely manual, state-based approach to building, deploying and maintaining customer databases. The state-based approach using Microsoft SSDT was increasingly at odds with the team’s faster pace, scaling and direction of change.

Internal development activity was ramping up to quickly support new services, including an Azure assessment capability that scanned customer tenants to identify both issues and opportunities for optimization and cost reduction. At the same time, rapid customer growth was creating a larger, more complex database estate for them to manage.

Need for flexibility and efficiency

Mastermind Group’s serial DACPAC-based deployment process with SSDT was not cut out for their continued scale, speed and complexity of business and technology change. As the number of customers and schema changes increased, they required careful planning and sequencing, strict branching discipline and significant coordination between engineers just to avoid conflicts.

As a result, deployments became slower, sometimes taking up to 90 minutes. Releases were batched to make the overhead worthwhile, hitting engineers’ ability to move quickly and limiting their freedom to respond in the face of changing situations.

As Sander Stad, Data Platform Engineer at Masterminds Group, explains “Because it took a lot of time, we just waited until we had quite a few changes to go through. It took too much time and cost too much money, so we would only do releases maybe once or twice a month.”

Supporting advanced deployments

As Mastermind Group’s data platform evolved, deployment scenarios became more challenging. Their engineers had to introduce custom scripts, handle non-standard changes and selectively skip individual databases experiencing issues to avoid impacting wider releases.

The state-based deployment model using SSDT, driven by schema comparison rather than explicit intent, further increased the difficulty the team were experiencing in releasing value faster and more frequently. These scenarios required extra time and attention from engineers.

The growing complexity of schemas compounded the situation. Handling bespoke changes, sequencing dependencies and applying conditional logic across different customer environments proved challenging. It became a juggling act to balance complexity with the need to deliver changes safely and reliably at scale.

Scalability for future growth

The limitations of the state-based approach with SSDT became clearer as Masterminds Group looked ahead. A release process that effectively dictated when the business could ship was not acceptable. Engineers were spending too high a proportion of their time shepherding deployments through to completion instead of dedicating time to value-add work, such as building and improving services. “Looking at how development was going to ramp up over the next six or seven months, we knew something had to change,” says Sander. “We needed an approach that could support more advanced deployments and go beyond simple schema comparison.”

Beyond operations, delivery costs were also becoming a concern. Long-running, serial deployments consumed large numbers of GitHub minutes while Windows-based build environments added further overhead. Improving deployment efficiency was essential to keeping costs under control as the platform and customer base grew.

Together, these pressures pointed to the need for a more reliable, flexible and future-proofed way to manage database change.

The Solution

As an existing Redgate Gold Partner, Masterminds Group had early access to Redgate Flyway Enterprise and trusted it as a potential replacement for their DACPAC-based setup.

Sander knew though, that simply importing their existing processes into Redgate Flyway Enterprise, would not meet their goals. Masterminds Group needed to lay the groundwork, redesigning their pipeline and deployment structure. Their SQL Package compared state and generated changes for each database, one after the other, taking 1.5 hours for 30+ database using Windows Runners which was very slow and expensive. Sander introduced key changes to address these two core issues. First the switch from Windows to Linux Runners and then migrating from Azure DevOps to GitHub to enable parallel deployments across customer environments, all aimed at reducing costs and increasing speed. With assistance from Redgate Flyway Enterprise’s CLI their new migrations-based pipeline enables multiple databases to be deployed concurrently, with 60+ databases now taking a total of around 6 minutes. Fast-fail-forward ensures they can exclude specific databases from a deployment using GitHub environment variables, so problematic databases are skipped without blocking others.

Prior to rolling these changes out, Masterminds Group needed to prepare their engineering team for the cultural shift to migration-based deployment. Sander led a workshop to introduce the changes and familiarize colleagues with the planned parallel workflows. Comprehensive documentation was also produced by Sander and made available through their own repository, to provide information and help answer questions the team might have had. Only once this initial foundation work had been done, was Redgate Flyway Enterprise introduced to a core team of four senior engineers.

Reducing deployment time and cost was the key consideration for Masterminds Group. Redgate Flyway Enterprise’s migration-based approach applies only incremental changes rather than reconciling entire schemas, while support for parallel execution across environments addressed the limits of serial deployment. Its lightweight, SQL-based model also reduced the need for heavy pre- and post-deployment handling.

Flexibility for engineers was equally important. Migration-based deployments removed the need to bundle changes into infrequent releases that held up changes and meant teams could work independently. Data transformations and non-standard changes could be made without tripping up delivery across the wider platform.

Clear visibility into database changes was another priority. Redgate Flyway Enterprise maintains an explicit record of deployments in each environment, when a change has been applied, and the order in which a change has taken place. This capability proves essential in helping maintain consistency across customers while delivering the information necessary to complete audits and meet compliance requirements as their estate grew.

Finally, Redgate Flyway Enterprise aligns with the team’s longer-term plans to strengthen CI/CD practices. Its support for automated, repeatable workflows meant database changes could be embedded in a workflow-driven team pipeline for results based on best practice.

The Results

Redgate Flyway Enterprise played a key role in how Masterminds Group transformed their database changes, delivering faster releases, greater control and a platform ready for the future.

Deployment times have fallen dramatically. The team can now deploy changes across more than 60 databases in as little as six minutes, down from around 90 minutes previously. Faster deployments have cut feedback loops and mean engineers can focus on higher-value work, including building new services and delivering customer projects.

Sander’s pre‑implementation work, introducing the shift to a migrations‑based approach and creating clear documentation to support the rollout, was critical to the team’s successful adoption. Now, their migration-based deployments with Redgate Flyway Enterprise have brought greater flexibility and predictability to Masterminds Group’s environment. Engineers have fine-grained control over how changes are built and released using explicit, ordered migrations rather than relying on end-state comparisons. This enables teams to work independently on assignments, means safer handling of complex changes, and ensures consistent behavior across customer environments with everything integrated into an automated CI/CD pipeline.

Version control has played a central role in the new model operation. Redgate Flyway Enterprise provides engineering with a single, authoritative and easy-to-digest record of all database deployments across each environment for parallel delivery they can trust. Clear traceability has given new meaning to team collaboration and communication and delivered a solid foundation for analysis, troubleshooting and auditing.

Crucially, Redgate Flyway Enterprise has helped future-proof Masterminds Group’s technology platform and business for growth. Its combination of a simple command-line interface, automated workflow-driven deployments, and built-in visibility and traceability mean engineers can make both detailed and large-scale changes quickly and reliably, in response to individual customer needs and evolving business demands.

Change now happens within a flexible, well-controlled deployment environment founded on standardized, repeatable processes. With Redgate Flyway Enterprise in place, the engineering team can work on the platform, confident in the knowledge they are building for growth and scale and not programming in legacy, complexity or overhead.

With the team fully up and running, Redgate Flyway Enterprise has delivered clear cost savings. Parallel deployments that apply only incremental changes have significantly reduced CI pipeline run times and overall compute usage, while smaller, more reliable releases have minimized re-deployments and rollbacks to lower operational overhead.

At the same time, lightweight, script-driven migrations have enabled use of their newly introduced Linux-based build agents, avoiding higher costs and slower execution associated with their previous Windows-based SQL packaging. Together, these improvements have brought deployment costs under control while supporting a faster, more efficient way to deliver database changes.

Looking back, Sander says Redgate Flyway Enterprise was a convincing choice for everyone; “We needed the flexibility to handle increasingly sophisticated deployments. I proposed moving to migration-based deployments with Flyway Enterprise, and my colleagues were glad to make the change. Management trusted our understanding of the situation and our judgement so there wasn’t much convincing needed. It was simply, ‘OK, go ahead.’”