With some projector issues at SQL Saturday South Florida 2023, I had to lecture without demos this past weekend. I told everyone I would record the demos, so I’ve done that. The three demos are shown below, and if you download the deck, you can see where they fit into the talk.
Powerpoint: Bringing DevOps to the Database.pptx
Redgate is sponsoring Agile West this year, and the marketing team asked me to give a talk on database DevOps technologies.
I have a keynote talk, called Don’t Forget the Database, that I’ll be delivering on Wednesday. This covers some of the challenges of why the database is harder than software, but doesn’t need to be. I show some demos of zero downtime deployments as a part of this talk.
Likely I’ll record the demo and talk over it, as I have seen that technique work well and it keeps me from fumbling around.
My wife is coming with me. This is a quick Tues-Thur trip for me, and easy. Las Vegas is about an hour flight for me, and I only have a few commitments, so this is a chance for the two of us to see a show or two and get out of town for a short break.
I’m lucky that some of my business travel allows my wife to come around, and it’s worth the expense to bring her and make the trip more enjoyable. That makes it easy for me to handle the 20-30 trips a year I make.
If you’re at the show, stop by the Redgate booth or my talk and say hi.
I was working with a client recently and one of the managers said they wanted to encourage innovation inside their organization. That sounded good, but as I thought about it, I wasn’t sure what this means, or if it’s really something that matters. Let’s take a few examples and think about this in a modern organization that builds and operates software.
If I am a developer, I get a series of requirements or tickets where I have to write code. Perhaps I need to take inputs from a user, query a database, and produce a result. I might write code in C# 7 instead of C#6. Maybe I’d use a lambda instead of creating a new function. Perhaps I decide to ensure I use the stored procedure type with named parameters rather than submitting SQL as a batch. Is that innovative? It might be a better way to write code and improve the quality (or security or maintainability) of the code, but is it innovation?
Another example. I’m a DBA and I need to run scripts against production. All the DBAs use SSMS, but I decide to change. I store the scripts in a folder and use Flyway to execute them against production with an automated system like Octopus Deploy, which manages the security. Is that innovative or just adopting a more DevOps-y practice?
Jason Fried says innovation is overrated, which I think is true. At least when that’s an aim or we expect to build something radically different. I know there are sometimes we might come up with something new that our organization hasn’t done, but most of the time work is work. It’s tedious mundane, and it can be very repetitive. That’s why the urge to do and try something new pervades most development organizations.
I do think that you can regularly innovate in your workplace. You might not create something that’s never been done anywhere in the world, but you might get people in your org to try something new. To adopt a new technique or habit, to create higher quality code with a small change. That’s the type of innovation that I like to see and foster. That’s what DevOps encourages, experimentation and learning. It’s also what I think my examples above show. It’s innovation in this particular space, which hopefully makes work more interesting and enjoyable.
Steve Jones
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The code from my talk today at SQL Saturday Jacksonville is available in GitHub in a repo: Zero Downtime
There is a description in the readme, but you can open the DBClient folder and the VS solution for ZeroDowntime in there in VS 2019 and run it.
The SQL Code is numbered in order in the SQL folder.
If you have questions, please feel free to contact me or submit an issue on GitHub. Please feel free to use this presentation at your own employer or usergroup.
