Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

Practical Problems with CI

I agree. Continuous Integration has issues in the real world, at least it probably does in many companies. The more tests you have, the more likely you refactoring or changes will break something. The more things break, the more people will look to leave them alone, deferring the "fix" into the future.

This defeats the purpose of CI. The whole idea is to keep your software in releasable condition. That way you can push it out if you need to.

How do you deal with the constant build breaks? The first thing I’d do is see if I mad a mistake and can fix my code. That should be the first reaction.

The next thing is stop for a moment and see what tests are failing. It’s entirely possible that the tests aren’t valid or aren’t needed. Maintenance of tests is an issue. If this is a test that regularly breaks, I might call a quick meeting and see if we should remove it.

The last thing is that I’d rollback my code and then go back to work on it. Perhaps there’s another way to solve the issue and not break the build.

This isn’t magic. It’s also not easy. However if you are keeping up with your CI process and it’s healthy, I believe it will pay off over time with better software.

November 20, 2014
SQL Konference 2015

My first speaking date of the new year is scheduled. I’ll be at the SQL Server Konference 2015, near Frankfurt, Germany. Red Gate arranged things, and I’m looking forward to heading over and renting a car to drive in Germany.

And speaking, of course.

I don’t know the agenda or details, or which session I’m presenting, but it’s exciting.

Slightly bittersweet as I won’t make SQL Saturday #358 in Albuquerque. I’ve been to the last two, taking a day to ski at Taos, but I can’t make it this year as I’ll be speaking that week in Europe.

November 19, 2014
T-SQL Tricks – Custom Templates
I wrote about the Template Explorer, which comes with the SQL Server tools and is visible in Management Studio (SSMS). It’s handy, but there are limited code items in there. What if I want more?

That’s easy. Suppose I decide that I often need to create procedures with the EXECUTE AS clause. I usually do this:
```
CREATE PROCEDURE MyProc
   @id INT
WITH EXECUTE AS OWNER
AS
BEGIN

-- do work
BEGIN TRY

  COMMIT
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
  ROLLBACK
  EXEC uspErrorHandler;
END CATCH

END
```
It’s a basic template of stuff I do. Let’s stick this in our Template Explorer.

The first thing I do is go to the Stored Procedure folder. I can right click it and I’ll see this:

I choose template and a new one is created. I enter a name and I have a template. The first 6 templates here are defaults. The last one, highlighted below, is the one I created.

Now I right click it again and select Edit. At this point, it will open in a query window. This is just a file in my file system (under ), and like any other query, I can edit it. I paste in my script from above, and change a few items to parameters.

Now I can save this, and the next time I need this, just drag it into the main window and customize it.
November 19, 2014
The SQL Server Container

I’ve been hearing about Docker quite a bit lately. It’s a piece of software (and a company) that builds containers that provide isolation for an application, allowing a more lightweight way to separate our applications than virtualization. Right now the containers only run on Linux, but they allow a Docker container running PHP to run on a machine as though it were the only process running on the Linux host. Other Docker containers running on the same host could contain different versions of PHP and not have conflicts. Or you could have multiple versions of MongoDB, MySQL, Java, etc. that provide separation in a much less resource demanding way than virtualization does.

It makes me think back to the idea of having stripped down, lightweight database machines. We’ve gotten the Windows CORE OS, but I wonder if Microsoft would ever take this a step further and package an even more stripped down Windows OS, with SQL Server embedded in it. Rather than have to install Windows, SQL Server, and then potentially have administrators want to install other software on the host and incur the overhead of sharing resources, could we have a single installation that includes a bare bones, stripped down and optimized Windows/SQL Server combination that only functions as a SQL Server database machine?

I doubt Microsoft would ever move in that direction, but perhaps they might use a similar concept. It seems the push from Microsoft is for more services and hybrid solutions involving cloud type services. Perhaps smaller companies might want an appliance device that contains a SQL Server, or an application like Dynamics, with hybrid bursting power in the cloud. Certainly containers might make deployment of software easier in a PaaS environment.

Either way, Docker is coming to Windows, and it’s going to be another tool that developers should consider incorporating into their application development processes.

Steve Jones

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November 19, 2014