Voice of the DBA

Tag: DLM

  • Push Button Deployments

    I worked in an Agile team in 2000 and we deployed changes to our web platform every Wednesday for over 18 months. That was about the length of time I was involved before the small startup failed, but not for lack of technology. In fact, I managed a few weeks extra pay by helping sell and deploy our IP to another company.

    Deploying regularly and often, to meet business needs and get features into the hands of customers is important. For most businesses, this is something the CTO and CEO want. It can work, and there’s a case study with Nmbrs, a Redgate customer, that has used DLM with this quote:

    “The productivity of the team has improved dramatically. We were doing one database update a week, which took almost a full day. Now it takes ten minutes. We can spend the extra time we’ve gained developing new features.”

    That’s been my experience with tooling and automation. If you get things setup, as I did with my startup, then you gain confidence in deployments, are willing to make them more often, and get these small chunks of software to customers on a regular basis. It’s not just customers, as we found we could make some fundamental changes in databases and applications that helped smooth development later without affecting customers.

    I know I’m paid by Redgate to talk about DLM, but the concept, the idea, the processes really do work well. They’ll help you get features to customers quicker (and feedback to developers faster) as well as give you confidence that you can release, if you find an issue with your application.

  • Is Your Deployment Process Perfect?

    I’m sure your deployments aren’t perfect. I’ve had many successful ones, but I have always found some flaws in my systems over time. I’ve also found that the less flexibility I allow, the more likely things are to succeed.

    However less flexibility isn’t what most companies or clients want. In fact, they want the opposite. I know most developers want this as well, without constraints on what they can do.

    I think Redgate has been working to make things easier and more reliable for most companies. Certainly we have work to do and there are places to improve our products, but our DLM work on various products is really designed to reduce, or eliminate, silly mistakes that cause issues. We’ve tried to help companies set up a process that limits regression issues.

    I saw this short video from Redgate, where the lead Data Anlyst at Yorkshire Water talks about some of the improvements in their development process come about by implementing a DLM process. Over a couple of years, they’ve gotten many of their projects into a Continuous Delivery stack and that’s just the way they do things.

    Yorkshire Water

    The time savings are the big issues. There is less copying of production data around, more confidence in development, and as Shaun notes, time is money.

    If you think you want to build a more repeatable, reliable database development process, I think we give you a few options. The traditional, work in SSMS approach with SQL Source Control, or our Ready Roll work in Visual Studio. I’m particularly excited about Ready Roll as that’s how I’ve done a lot of development in the past.

    And, of course, I think our DLM Automation suite, allowing you to deploy changes to a CI environment and build deployment packages works well.

  • The Database is the Cornerstone

    I saw a case study video the other day from Redgate Software. It was a look at one of the upper management on Fitness First, a fitness/gym company that has facilities in dozens of countries. It’s a good, short summary of the benefits they’ve seen from implementing DLM and ALM, with the DevOps Guys.

    It’s worth a watch, and I especially like that this manager understands and gets that the database is the cornerstone of better software deployment. That’s his quote. Without being able to be flexible and agile with the database, it hampers your flexibility.

    Fitness First at SQL in the City

    I also appreciate that they do regression testing in an automated fashion. It helps them reduce the number of bugs and speeds their ability to deploy. They also have moved to curated sets of test data to allow them to test known cases and bugs they’ve seen.

    They also “run at speed”. They meet the business needs, they can work quicker to meet client demands. That’s important.

    Fitness First also did a presentation at SQL in the City. I sat in and was impressed, especially with some of the work from the DevOps Guys. It’s long, 40min, but interesting.

    Fitness First Case Study

    I wasn’t sure what to think when it started, but by the end, I think that this is a good view of how DevOps can help. It probably is more valuable to you if you have a backlog of work, but even if you want to develop and deploy at a pedestrian pace, having a DLM/ALM setup can build your confidence and reduce bugs.

    There are a few other short videos that showcase what some of our clients think of DLM and automated database deployment:

  • Redgate DLM Demo Slides

    I had someone ask about the DLM Demo slides, so here they are:

    DLM-Demo.pptx

    I’ll put together an overview of the demo as well that you can read about.