Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

  • SQL in the City 2014 – Two countries in two weeks

    I have had a fairly busy travel schedule the last few years. While I don’t love sitting on airplanes and being away from home, I do look forward to the events and seeing the amazing #SQLFamily and community we have for SQL Server. I’ve also learned a few tricks to make travel smoother, which reduces stress.

    It’s a good thing since the SQL in the City 2014 event schedule is going to be short in duration, but long in miles. We have two days coming this fall: London and Seattle. We open in London on Fri, Oct 24, 2014 and then a little over a week later will be in Seattle on Mon, Nov 3, 2014. It’s a packed schedule that has me flying 6,000 miles to the UK before returning home and getting ready for a 1,300 mile trip up to the Pacific Northwest.

    However I’m excited for both events. London draws a bit crowd, with a variety of SQL Server professionals that are excited to learn new ideas, tips, tricks, and tools to help them in their professional work. We’ll once again be near the center of town, at St Grange, just off the St Pauls and Blackfriars Underground stations.

    Seattle is a great town, and while I’m sure I’ll see some Summit attendees, I look forward to meeting lots of local SQL Server data professionals that won’t attend the Summit. I hope that if you’re in the area, you come to our event. After all, how can your boss say "no" to a free day of training? Especially if you’re not attending the Summit later that week. We’ll be at McCaw Hall, near the Space Needle.

    It’s a short tour this year, but an exciting one. We’ll also continue to expand our SQL in the City seminars to other cities in the future, and hope we get the chance to meet more of you as we look to support, educate, and participate in this amazing SQL Server community.

  • Version Control for Databases

    This is based on my Team Based Development with Version Control talk, which has evolved a bit.

    Abstract

    Getting your database under version control is ultimately a way of communicating changes and collaborating with team members, maintaining an audit trail and ensuring you always have a version to roll back to.

    In this session, we’ll cover why this gives you and your team a crucial advantage in reducing the risk in your development processes. We’ll also discuss another door that your team opens by adopting solid version control: setting up the fundamentals of continuous integration. You will learn what build automation means as a first step towards continuous integration and the value it brings as part of your evolving deployment process. We’ll also discuss branching strategies, and how to manage this for databases as part of your evolving deployment process.

    Goals

    • Understand the value of version/source control for databases
    • Learn the tools, standards, patterns and best practices needed to manage a database from source control
    • Identify the necessary flow within a team needed to develop a database with source control

    This talk includes the following demos:

    • Move database DDL into VCS manually
    • Link database DDL and lookup data with SQL Source Control
    • Make development changes and check into VCS
    • Setup a new developer DB linked to VCS
    • Changes flowing back and forth between developers
    • Resolving conflicts between development changes made by two people
    • Basic branching of code for bug fixes and linking a database for development work to an old branch

    Length: 45-75 minutes. Shorter lengths with fewer demos.

    Slides: Get Database Under Source Control.pptx (Slideshare)

  • The DBA Team Wants You!

    We’re looking for a few good DBAs. Actually, we’re looking for a few DBAs that wouldn’t mind sharing some of their human frailty and submitting the worst day they had as a DBA. Grant and I will be judging the entries and we’ll pick one to be the theme for our Christmas edition of the DBA Team.

    Don’t worry, we won’t make you ride a horse, but we’d like to feature you by name as we “enhance” your story with a few small additions. Perhaps you’ll be driving a fancy car, or be dressed to the nines. We might even have you performing a stunt or two.

    It won’t be pretty, probably not too flattering, but it should be fun. I haven’t heard if we will give out prizes to the top entries, but the winner will be relaxing Not Only SQL style in the sun, with a free ticket to SQL Cruise 2015.

    This contest should be some fun, and all it takes to enter is a little humility, a recognition of your mistakes, and a good sense of humor. If you’ve had a bad day, enter your submission and cross your fingers. And if you haven’t clicked through any of the links, you might want to. They make this editorial much more interesting.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music.

  • Continuous Database Delivery from the Command Line

    I’ve been working with Red Gate to learn more and the different ways in which we can help you ease and smooth the database deployment process. I know that I’ve dreaded deployments to production in most of my jobs, and only enjoyed them in one. The mission of one of the teams at Red Gate is to make this easier and easier and I’m learning about how they do that.

    They’ve also been working with many others in the world of software, providing them with tools, getting feedback, and learning from their experiences. One of the people that has done some work with our tools is Matt Whetton, and he wrote a piece on how he’d gotten SQL Compare to work with his version control system (VCS) to get a Continuous Integration (CI) process in place. He’s using TFS, as many of you are, though he has the SQL Source Control plug in to SSMS to make managing his database code easier.

    I won’t duplicate his process here, though it’s one that should work well. It has lots of pieces and parts, and might seem confusing, but it’s not. He describes in detail how he runs tools from the command line to build a more automated process. If you want us to do more of the work, we have an automation pack to smooth the entire process, and we’re improving it all the time.

    I would encourage you to think about building your own automated process for database changes. It might seem like adding work for no good reason, but it can pay off as you expand the process through later environments to deploy to QA, Staging, UAT, Production and any other environments you might need to. If you move to the cloud, having automated processes become even more important.

    You can also take a look at the Red Gate “Learn more about databass delivery and continuous integration” page.  We’ve got some resources up there and are looking to add more all the time.