SQL in the City Streamed in 2016 was a success, with lots of feedback that people enjoyed the sessions and format. With the release of SQL Clone, we’ve decided to do it again.
The SQL Clone Product Launch Live Stream is coming in a couple weeks, on Mar 29, live from Cambridge, UK. I’ll be traveling there, along with Grant Fritchey, and we’ll both be helping broadcast all day, repeating sessions across many time zones.
Redgate just launched SQL Clone, a new product that can provision copies of databases in seconds. By copies, I mean full sized, up to 2TB copies of your database, each separate and isolated, and built in seconds. What’s even more amazing is that each of these copies takes just a few MB of space.
As a launch contest, Redgate is giving away 5 Amazon Echo Dots to some lucky individuals. The overall winner will also receive a copy of SQL Clone. To enter, you need to to tell us what “skill” for Alexa you would build. Perhaps you want to know if any backups failed. Maybe you want to know how many deployments you’ve made to your database. Perhaps you just want to have the Dot remind you to pull the lasagna out of the oven. Just let us know in the comments section below to enter and good luck.
At Redgate, we had some fun with SQL Clone and an echo, building an Alexa skill that provisions a database using your voice. Not terribly practical, but that might be fun if a developer gets annoyed and wants to yell at Alexa to create a a new database clone. You can see how they built the real skill here (or watch the video).
Provisioning a database with SQL Clone and Alexa
Over the last few years I’ve been talking DevOps for databases with lots of people, and one of the obstacles many people face is using a shared database for development.
Why? Often because the developers need a certain amount of data and they use a copy of production. They also don’t have (or want to use) the disk space to give everyone a copy of the database. With SQL Clone, you can see that my 97GB database uses only 49MB for each developer.
Take a walkthrough of SQL Clone and see how it works for you. Download the 14 day free trial and see how SQL Clone might help you smooth your database development process.
On Monday, Redgate released v1.0 of SQL Clone, and I’m excited that the product is finally available. I’m excited because this has been a long time coming, but it’s worth the wait.
You can certainly download SQL Clone and try it out, but I’d also say you should check out this virtual tour to see how the product works. It makes sense to me, but I’ve been testing it for months.
I’ve also written a few pieces about how SQL Clone plays with TDE (part 1 and part 2), and there’s plenty more at the SQL Clone site. Check it out today and see how you can easily build dev/test environments, at full size, without using all the disk space.
A quick reminder that tomorrow, Feb 21 at 12pm EST, I’ll be hosting another DevOps, Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) webinar. Together with Arneh Eskandari, we’ll show how we can each make changes to our own database, push the changes to git and reconcile merge issues.
Register now, and watch us work together to perform distributed database development.
