Voice of the DBA

Tag: DevOps

  • Speaking at the NYC Lunch and Learn–May 23

    In a couple of weeks, I’ll be in New York City for the Redgate DevOps Devour Hour Lunch and Learn. This is at the Industrious office at 730 3rd Avenue, which is a neat location near the tip of Manhattan.

    This is a half day event, from 12-430, with a short happy hour afterwards. I’ll be there, along with Kendra Little and Erik Darling, talking a variety of different topics.

    • The SQL Server Performance Tasting Menu – Erik
    • A Tale of Two Clouds: What I Learned from Migrating from Azure SQL MI to Amazon RDS for SQL Server – Kendra
    • Designing Zero Downtime Database Deployments – me

    I’m excited to head back to NYC, which is always a fun trip for me. Even more exciting, Erik and Kendra are people who always get me to think with their views of how to work with databases effectively.

    My session will be a mix of tech demos and tips/tricks on how to better make changes to your database systems without interrupting customers.

    You can register today and I’ll see you in a few weeks.

  • SQL Saturday Austin 2025 Slides

    My slides for SQL Saturday Austin are here: ArchitectZeroDowntime_SQLSatAustin2025

    The repo is here: https://github.com/way0utwest/ZeroDowntime

    If you have questions, let me know.

  • DevOps Day – Atlanta

    No tour this year, but Redgate does have a few DevOps events scheduled. I’m hoping for more, and the first one for me this year is Atlanta. You can register for the DevOps Day Atlanta Workshop on May 15, just a few weeks away.

    I’ll be there to set the stage and give a high level view of how Redgate approaches better database code management and deployment with Flyway. We’ll also have a whiteboarding session if you have questions to solve some architectural challenges.

    If you can make it, please register today and come enjoy a day with us.

  • Database First or Application First

    One of the challenges in software development is coordinating database and application changes when one depends on the other. I find many software development teams struggle with this, especially in today’s environments when no one wants to take a system offline. While some companies can stage and manage deployments, many of us find our systems need to keep running 24×7 with minimal outages (if any).

    Lots of you work in environments where your software is changing on a regular basis. Plenty of you will either be developing those changes, or managing the systems to which those changes are deployed. You likely will be coordinating with other people (in either case) to deploy a software artifact (C#, Java, Python, etc.) and a set of database changes in order for your clients to use whatever new functionality is being delivered.

    My question today is do you deploy database changes first or application changes first. Certainly you can deploy both on the same day or in the same pipeline. However, even if you use parallel pipelines, likely one side will finish first, and you likely have some preferred order for deployments. My question today is what order do you prefer (or is mandated to you).

    Maybe you don’t care. After all, with modern coding and feature flags, you can deploy either side first (front end or back end) and not disturb your clients. I’ve seen many successful deployments from organizations both ways. Some like letting application developers deploy their code with expected database changes hidden behind flags. Others want the database to get patched and the software changed later to use the database changes.

    Lots of people want everything deployed at once, but if you assume that is the case, I hope you have downtime scheduled, as you can’t usually get everything deployed simultaneously.

    I tend to prefer database first, with dark deployed changes that don’t affect the front end. Of course the front end needs to support these dark deployed changes, but that’s easy by just following good coding practices, which aren’t that hard.

    Let me know today what you prefer and why. Or if you don’t care and can deploy in either order.

    Steve Jones

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