Voice of the DBA

Tag: Redgate

  • Pushing SQL Change Automation Code to Azure DevOps

    Making changes on your own system for a SQL Change Automation project is great, but if you’re the only one using the project, it might feel like a lot of overhead. I’d argue it isn’t and it’s a better way of building software, but that’s a separate discussion.

    For most of us, we need to get a good copy (and backup of code) as well as share this with others. In the previous article, I was making changes in my own SQL Change Automation project. I was committing these to a local git repo and now I want to put them into another place. This article will look at moving my repo to the cloud.

    Enter Azure DevOps

    I love Azure DevOps as a software development platform. It has everything I need, hundreds of extensions, and I can easily replace parts of it with other technology if I want. I could use my own git repo locally (or at BitBucket) and still build/release with Azure DevOps. I could use the Azure DevOps repos and build my software with Team City. Or release it with Octopus Deploy.

    I have flexibility.

    For me, I’m going to stick with Azure DevOps in this series, and I’ll show you how to add a project to Azure DevOps.

    Sign In to Visual Studio

    When I created this project, I used a git repo as the default from Visual Studio. However, as you can see, I didn’t add any remotes.

    2019-02-28 16_11_35-SQLBuilds - Microsoft Visual Studio

    I did log into Visual Studio at some point when I started it, and since I’ve used this before, I have a number of connections to different services. You can see below my connections in Team Explorer.

    2019-02-28 16_12_31-SQLBuilds - Microsoft Visual Studio

    If you go to dev.azure.com/name, you can see your organization. For me, this is https://dev.azure.com/SteveJonesRedgate/. When I log in, I see my organization, and a list of projects.

    2019-02-28 16_18_38-Projects - Home

    In the upper right is a “create project” button, and I’ll click that. When I do, I get a blade to enter some data. I can do that, and I’ll make this public, so anyone can see it.

    2019-02-28 16_19_25-Projects - Home

    The project is created, and I get a welcome screen. For now, let me ignore this and go back to Visual Studio. If I click the Sync item in Team Explorer, I’ll see this:

    2019-02-28 16_22_46-SQLBuilds - Microsoft Visual Studio

    VS sees my account. If I click advanced, I can see the projects, and I’ll select the one I just created.

    2019-02-28 16_23_10-SQLBuilds - Microsoft Visual Studio

    When I click publish, this moves the repo up to the web. If I return to my project online, I can click “Repos” and see the code.

    2019-02-28 16_24_19-SQLBuilds - Repos

    This is the structure as my local VS project. If I had make a screen shot of the before, this would be an empty space online, with instructions for connecting local repos, adding files, and more.

    A Backup Copy

    From here, I can continue to do local development and push/pull as necessary between my local project and the online repo at Azure DevOps. I can set up branches and do more. This is also my backup in case my local storage crashes. From here I can pull down copies of my code if needed.

    In the next article, we’ll look at how we get code from this repository onto another machine.

  • The Reader’s Choice Awards are Taking Nominations

    If you’re using products, you might want to nominate a vendor or product for a database tool that helps you. The Database Trends and Applications Reader’s Choice Awards is taking nominations for the next few weeks.

    At Redgate Software, we try to build useful products that help you solve problems and get work done. If you think we help you, I’d appreciate you nominating us in one or more categories.

    Enter your nomination today.

  • SQL in the City 2019 in London

    We’ve started setting up our SQL in the City Summits for 2019 and the first one is London on April 30. I’m going to start making my plans now and hope to see some of you there.

    We’re still finalizing agendas and getting some speakers lined up, but if you’re anywhere near London, take a day and come see us talk about DevOps, compliance, and Redgate.

  • Do You Have a SQL Server Estate?

    At Redgate, we do a lot of research. Maybe not as much as Microsoft Research, but we are always trying to investigate more about customer problems and challenges before we build or change software.

    Take our survey on SQL Server Configuration Management and you could win prizes. Or a prize.

    I’ve never thought about managing an estate, but not that I live on a horse ranch, that has a little more meaning. In the past, I’ve managed hundreds of instances and thousands of databases. That’s certainly an estate, but even when I had 5 servers, that is something of a small estate of things to keep me busy.

    At Redgate, we know there are lots of challenges in managing SQL Servers. We constantly have a team of people working on SQL Monitor, and they are releasing changes every week or two. In fact, we just released v9.0 this year, full of enhancements customers have asked for.

    In addition to the tactical team that’s building and fixing things day to day, we are doing future research into where to take our monitoring and tuning software. That’s some of what this survey is about. Let us know about which things might help you smooth the process of managing systems.

    Give us a few minutes and a little information and take our survey. You might find that a future version of SQL Monitor contains something you thought would be useful.

    Take the Survey today.