We had a Simple Talks podcast recently where we discussed roll forward vs roll back. You can watch the episode and listen to our thoughts, but one interesting place was when we talked about deployments. Grant mentioned that he deployed from version control/source control at a previous employer. I asked him whether he did that for every system.

His response: “Well, …”

He admitted that most, but not all, databases came from a controlled source. There were some systems that had a more ad hoc change process. I wonder how many of you have consistent processes throughout your organization. I suspect not many of you do, especially if an organization isn’t small. Often, different groups and applications are in a constant state of flux, with lots of different processes and protocols.

Some groups are more mature and have stable staff who expect to deploy changes in a certain way. This might be on a known cadence, with documents or processes in place already. Others applications might have been developed quickly; perhaps they are newer and use more automation to deploy changes. Some might even use things like packages from an ORM or a vendor that takes control of database changes away from anyone managing the database. Does anyone deal with Spring Boot and very optimistic developers?

I wonder how many of you have a consistent process for promoting database code to production across all your teams. Maybe 80% is a better metric, as this accounts for those groups severely limited by legacy technology or those that might be experimenting with new ways of working.

Even those companies that have platform engineering groups in place to ease the flow for both developers and operations often aren’t consistent throughout the organization. Often, getting everyone to adopt a standard is hard and takes time.

That might be the biggest challenge with standardizing database deployments: time. Organizations grow and change, new technologies come, and by the time we think we’ve gotten everyone to agree to change, who everyone is has changed. We have someone or something new, and we’re forever chasing standardization. Even when we might have a great DevOps process or a platform engineering team for software, we don’t do this for databases.

I believe having a consistent, standardized process is a worthwhile goal, but one where 80% success is probably good enough in most organizations. If you can get most teams to follow the same process, you’ll increase efficiencies and ensure a better software development life cycle.

Steve Jones

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