Once you have your continuous integration (CI) and or continuous delivery (CD) aka Database lifecycle management process built, configured, successfully testing and ready to roll, the next decision point is when to run it and how.
January 13, 2017
In general, the term “failover” refers to switching from a previously active machine, other hardware component, or network to a passive (or unused) one, to sustain high availability and reliability. In most cases, a failover event is an automatic process, while a the similar event, switchover, requires manual intervention in switching between the active/passive elements.
January 13, 2017
When working with SQL Server database static data in the context of version control, there are several key requirements.
January 12, 2017
As a DBA considering version controlling a database, there are a lot of challenges to setting up the team with software to check in changes, to manage the development environment (shared or dedicated models) and set the rules of the game – locking vs not locking etc. But before committing to this fully, a potentially preliminary stage would be to set up a centralized system, where the database was automatically committed to source control each night. This could be done by a single person and wouldn’t require developer participation or even knowledge.
January 10, 2017
In the article, “What is a data dictionary and why would I want to build one?” a data dictionary was described and compared to other alternatives to documenting, auditing and versioning a database. The article also described the difference between a Dumb and a Smart data dictionary.
Now that we’ve whetted your appetite, this article will explain how to create a smart data dictionary using XML schema change exports from ApexSQL Diff.
January 10, 2017
When working on a SQL database development, there is sometimes a requirement to keep two databases in sync. For example, you have a development environment and want to automatically synchronize changes with a QA database frequently, so that tests can always be run on the most recent version. The implemented mechanism should handle this by detecting a specific schema change in the DEV database and automatically synchronizing with the QA database, fully unattended and on a schedule. The whole process should be run unattended and to be fully automated and the databases will be updated in near real time as we’ll schedule the process to run every 15 minutes
January 9, 2017
One of the challenges SQL Server development teams face is whether to version control a database and if so how to keep the development database in sync with the source control repository.
January 9, 2017
The core component of SQL Server is the Database Engine service. It is identified with the Windows service named MSSQLSERVER (sqlservr.exe) for the default instance, and for the named instance, the customized instance name is appended to the name of the service, e.g. MSSQLTESTDEPT.
January 5, 2017
One of the main benefits of a SQL database version control is that any version of an object committed to the repository, is available through the revision history. With that being said, browsing the history allows seeing all versions of the specific database object, committed over time, and reverting any version from the history in order to apply it against a database. By utilizing such functionality, a database can be brought back to a working state in case some change caused a problem
December 30, 2016
Non-transactional data in tables that is never (or rarely) changed, for example currency codes, postal codes or personal ID numbers, is often referred to as “static data” (also known as lookup or reference data). Although static data isn’t part of the database schema, it can be thought of in much the same way. Simply creating test data for static tables, for testing purposes, may allow the tests to be successfully executed, but often won’t render meaningful looking results and in some cases, could result in failure, if the static data was tightly coupled to application/database function. Static data tables also tend to be much smaller than transactional tables.
December 30, 2016
