This picture is out of date. I’ll make sure we get a new one next week at SQL in the City Streamed that includes Kendra Little.
On Sept 5th, is SQL in the City Streamed. Register today and watch us talk about Azure, Machine Learning, full stack development, and more. We’ll talk a little Redgate as well.
I’m off today to Norway for SQL Saturday Oslo, but I’ll also be prepping for SQL in the City Streamed. Hope to see you online.
At Redgate, we release a lot of changes to our products. In fact, this is the “About Redgate” slide I’ve been using in talks related to the company.
If you look in the lower right, you’ll see product releases from last year (2017). We have 30-ish products, so that’s roughly 38 releases per product. Not every product releases at this cadence, but a lot of them release every week. SLQ Monitor, for example, releases every Wednesday.
Of course, there’s the inevitable release-a-bug-and-need-to-fix-it-so-a-second-release this week, but those don’t happen too often. I’ve been tracking releases this year, and not too many were corrected in the same week, but it does happen.
Some people say that’s the problem with DevOps, but I think it’s the advantage. I guarantee that most software releases include bugs. If you release once a quarter, are you ready to re-release in a couple days to fix something? Or do customers live with issues for a quarter? The advantage of DevOps is we can fix things quickly, in addition to adding new features quickly.
Redgate does some amazing development work and I’m proud of the ladies and gentleman that write the code.
I still complain, and there’s room for improvement, but they do a great job and I try to remember to thank them and complement their work when I do see them.
SQL Prompt is amazing and it’s my favorite tool. It’s actually what many people want first from Redgate because it makes coding much easier. One of the most used features is the reformat feature (CTRL+K,Y), since formatting really matters to developers.
One of the neat features of SQL Prompt is that you can format just a portionof your script. That means if you’re working on a large script and want to reformat just a part of it, you can.
Here’s how:
As much as I liked the ability to quickly and easily build development and test databases with SQL Provision, I thought the dashboard of cloned databases was hideous. It left a lot to be desired, and frankly, the dark theme is annoying to me. Here’s my old dashboard.
I wasn’t alone, as various customers were asking about enhancements and additions. The team has been listening and I talked with them a few months ago during a meeting about possible ideas and designs. I saw an early mock up, and was hoping it would be released soon.
After coming back from vacation, I saw an update was available, so I applied it. After a few minutes, I saw this:
Once this was done, the page refreshed, and I saw the dashboard. I know, not much has changed, but look at the upper right part of the screen. There’s a blue box that says “Preview new dashboard”.
Once you click this, you get a new dashboard, which thankfully doesn’t use the dark theme. What’s nice is that I also get some information at the top of what my activity is. I can see the total clones and images, and the machines that are working or having issues.
I also have options for resorting the clones and images. I can change the sorting, which is set by the client, not the server. This means one person can see clones by instance, while another can see clones by image.
If I change this, you can see that I get a new view at the bottom.
There are more changes needed, and some coming. There is a feedback item when you switch to give feedback to the team, and I’d encourage you to do so. Certainly I think sizes or some calculation of total sizes for images and clones is needed. It would be nice to get filters for sizing, so I can also tell if someone is using a clone to do a lot of work and growing it’s size. One of the important things here is that you ought to not get to wedded to a particular clone. We want to rebuild these as needed.
I’d also like to see some way to link images to a source and perhaps group them so that I know how many copies I have of some database, like production. While I think we definitely need a couple of images at any time for rotation, we want to get control of our systems and limit the number.
If you have other feedback, let us know, and we’ll build a better dashboard together.
