Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

  • The Redgate Way

    Recently Matt Hilbert, from Redgate Software, wrote a piece on our blog about our journey to DevOps. It’s a great read, summing up some of the things that we’ve learned in our journey across the last decade. Matt is a great writer, and it’s worth a few minutes of your time to check it out and think about all the things that we’ve been through.

    I’ve known some people at Redgate for 18+ years, and I’ve worked there for 12, so I’ve had the chance to see quite a few changes. When I started, teams worked for long periods of times, in what is really a waterfall methodology. They went through substantial phases of development, testing, and beta releases, with Brad McGehee and myself having plenty of time to learn a product and then know it would be stable for a year or so.

    That slowly started to change, as Matt describes, with teams moving to new methods of building software, experimenting and learning. The Prompt team was one of the most ambitious, working in pair programming and finding ways to release almost on demand. Over time, other teams caught up and built some amazing processes. We even had two teams working on some products, with alternating two week sprint cycles to allow them to release every week. That was an impressive coordination of software development teams.

    Even today, I’m constantly impressed by teams. They aren’t all always rock stars, but they often exceed my expectations. I will see some slowdowns when teams change their people, process, or tooling, but then they will leap forward. The Data Masker team has been impressive lately, with some fantastic productivity improvements being added to the software. I apologized recently for not taking the Data Catalog team seriously for almost a year, but they have done more than I ever imagined with that tool in the last six months.

    We do continue to improve our software development skills at Redgate. We do release often, but really, we try to also improve the quality of our software, improve the skills of our developers, while working to retain talented individuals and help them enjoy their chosen career. We still produce bugs, we never get everything done as fast as sales, marketing, or even me, would like, but I do think that the last ten years has been an incredible growth as set of software development teams. Now our challenge is more closely aligning all teams to work in a loosely coupled, but tightly integrated fashion.

    DevOps is really a better way to build software for most organizations and teams. It often doesn’t change a lot about the actual code we write, but it does get developers, infrastructure staff, and management to rethink how we work, especially how we work together. That’s the hardest part to get through to many customers. This isn’t an install-a-tool-and-things-are-great system. Tools do help, but your attitude, your focus, and your willingness to work as a team are more important.

    Read about our journey. We’ve taken 1,000 steps, but there is more for us to learn, change, and implement as we move forward. Think about how you would want to change things at your company, and maybe pass this along to your manager. It’s not easy, and it might not be quick, but it’s an incredible journey. It’s also very much worth the time and effort you put into it.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Getting Started with SQL Prompt 10

    This week we released SQL Prompt 10, which is an exciting milestone for us. I remember when I discovered this little gem for Database Weekly and sent it over to Redgate as something they might want to buy. They did and have made dramatic and amazing improvements over the last decade+.

    I’ll have a few notes on new features, some of which have been leaking out in v9 already. We’ve started to get away from holding all features until a new release and slowly trickling them out, sometimes as experimental feature flagged items.

    There is a new Welcome window,which I think is a nicer way to show off a feature than the tool tips. I can see a few things at a glance, have some links, and get this back from the SQL Prompt | Help menu at any time.

    2019-11-08 08_31_30-SQL Prompt - Welcome - Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio

    I think SQL Prompt is the best intellisense tool for SQL Server, and many people agree. If you’ve never tried it, you can get an eval today and see what you think. If you already use it, know that we’re still investing in the tool and driving it forward for the new data platform on SQL Server 2019.

  • Focusing on Business Value

    This was a fun talk with David Atkinson at Redgate. We talk satellites, finance, and more. Including some early history of the company.

    We are talking about how to get things done for the business, to be effective in your work. Tools help, but it’s more that we want you to reframe the way you work to ensure that we don’t just try to get our specific task done, but ensure that our task gets a feature or fix into a customer’s hands.

    Take a quick 30 minutes break and enjoy this discussion. I had fun recording it and hope you do as well.

  • Teams in SQL Clone and SQL Provision

    SQL Clone v4 is out, and the big change is the addition of the Teams feature. I guess technically this is just for SQL Clone, which is included in SQL Provision, but hey, I need the Google juice with both product names.

    If you look under the permissions menu item, you see any specific permissions you’ve created, but there’s also a Teams tab at the top.

    2019-10-21 15_46_48-Microsoft Edge

    If you click on this, you will see the basic overview, and the chance to start using Teams instead of individual permissions. This is designed to let you group images and instances for groups of users, rather than the gross permissions at the admin/image/clone level.

    2019-10-21 15_46_59-Microsoft Edge

    There is an article that describes and an overview of Teams and another that talks through the DevOps Self-Service with Teams in our Product Learning section of the Redgate Hub. These will help you get started implementing the feature.

    Personally I like the matrix approach to security of using groups that have permissions to objects and then putting users, or groups, in the group to handle access. It worked well for me in SQL Server and in AD.

    Teams does this with a three phase approach, letting you limit the source (images), the target (instances) and the user in a matrix, which really simplifies the view that any particular user has of the clone environment. I like the blade we have that shows this.

    2019-10-21 15_50_06-Teams in SQL Clone and SQL Provision - Open Live Writer

    Once you start to get used to building images and deploying clones, there can be a lot of moving parts in a semi-mature environment, which can be confusing and problematic for developers that just need databases. Limiting the number of images or instances that a group can see will make it easier for them to just get the databases they should.

    What’s more, I could use this with masked and unmasked images for separate teams, allowing developers to use one set of data and customer service or QA to have another. With colors to designate teams, this makes things easier for admins.

    Ultimately the matrix approach is flexible, but also confusing, so limit the number of teams to what you need and try not to be too granular. That ensures new admins can understand the configuration and limits the chances you’ll accidentally grant too many rights to a user.

    Give SQL Provision (SQL Clone + Data Masker) a try today if you are looking for ways to quickly provision large scale databases for development.