Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

  • Bringing the Redgate Seminar to Brisbane

    We’ve been on a Redgate tour this year, running lots of events to interest, educate, and inspire customers. We know that there are challenges in building and operating database software, and our goals are to help you get better.

    I’m heading to Australia in a few weeks. Hopefully on a slightly larger plane (and inside).

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    The Redgate Seminar is in Brisbane on May 2. It’s an all day event where we’ll talk about how Redgate can help you solve your database management challenges, as well as bring DevOps to the database.

    We’ll open the day with a keynote on the state of the database landscape, looking at some of the things we’ve learned from research (our own and industry pieces) as well as from customers. The world of databases is on a journey and I’ll talk through some of that.

    The rest of the day has a number of sessions on products as well as panels where you can hear from not only me, but also industry experts that will join us. We’re also partnering with Octopus Deploy, and you’ll hear from their engineers as well a few of ours.

    If you can get to Brisbane, come join me. Register today and  I promise you a day of fun at the Pacific Hotel in Spring Hill. Redgate Software is a great host at events, and this is a chance to enjoy our hospitality.

  • Webinar Apr 9: Accelerating Success: De-risking and Streamlining Releases with Flyway Enterprise

    On Tuesday I have a webinar with a Redgate sales engineer: Accelerating Success: De-risking and Streamlining Releases with Flyway Enterprise. This will cover

    You can register here.

    In this webinar, we’ll look at the Flyway solution and technology, with some demos that show how this can create more reliable, repeatable deployments that catch errors or issues sooner by testing deployments multiple times.

    This is a nice, short look at Flyway, so if you haven’t seen the technology, or you have DBA deploy manually, come check this out.

    Register today and I’ll see you Tuesday.

  • Apr 9 Webinar: Accelerating Success: De-risking and Streamlining Releases with Flyway Enterprise

    UPDATE: This moved to Apr 9

    Join me Tuesday, Apr 9 for a webinar, 10:00am CDT. You can register here and then come watch live with questions or get the recording.

    In this webinar, we’ll look at how the Flyway suite of tools can help your team better build and manage database deployments. I love Flyway, and it does a lot of things I was doing in 2001 when DevOps wasn’t even a term and we were releasing every week.

    You can do the same thing, with some of the advanced things Flyway brings to the table that you don’t have to build and maintain.

    • script generation
    • code analysis rules
    • change and drift reports
    • a comprehensive view for impact assessment

    There’s more, but join us on Thursday by registering today

    Tell your friends as well, pass this along, and bring your questions.

  • SQL Compare Force Column Order in a Table

    I had a client that was concerned about SQL Compare behavior when a developer adds a column to the middle of a table. I wanted to reassure them, so I wrote this post to show how SQL Compare behaves by default.

    This is part of a series of posts on SQL Compare. 

    Making a Table Change

    Let’s assume I have this table in a database:

    CREATE TABLE [dbo].[Product]
(
[ProductID] [int] NOT NULL,
[ProductName] [varchar] (50) NULL,
[ProductDesc] [varchar] (1000) NULL,
[ProductSize] [char] (1) NULL,
[ProductWeight] [int] NULL,
[ProductColor] [varchar] (20) NULL,
[StatusID] [int] NULL
)
GO

    I want to add a column to this table, called ProductQtyPerUnit. However, I decide to add this before that StatusID column so all my product data is together.

    Note: This shouldn’t be done. Don’t worry about order of columns. Deal with that in your INSERT/SELECT statements instead.

    If I do this in the SSMS designer, I’ll right click the table and select INSERT Column.

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    Then I can add the column, as appropriate to my table.

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    Before I save this, I’ll create a scripts folder and compare things. As you can see, things are in synch.

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    Now I’ll save the change.

    SQL Compare Behavior

    Now I’ll refresh my project. When I do that, I see a difference, as I should. Note that SQL Compare detects the change, and shows the new column in the middle of the table.

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    I’ll click Deploy and generate the deployment script. When I do that, I see the script below. Note that SQL Compare has just added a column, not rebuilt the table.

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    This is controlled by the Force Column Order option, which is off by default. This is the way we’d like to have the tool behave, as rebuilding tables is unnecessary.

    I’ll close this dialog and then click Edit Project and select the options tab. I can search for Force and see the option is off.

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    to show how this works, I’ll check the checkbox and then recompare. Now when I generate the deployment script, I see this. The deployment wizard opens to this warning.

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    If I view this script, you can see below that this part of the script creates a new table and then renames it after data is moved and the old table dropped.

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    In general, you should leave this option off all the time. The physical order of columns doesn’t matter.

    If you haven’t used SQL Compare from Redgate, it’s the industry standard for SQL Server schema comparison and an amazing tool. Download an eval today and give it a try.