Workshop | A Crash Course in Database DevOps

Deploying database changes, for many of us, is horrible. It’s often a manual, time-consuming and error prone process. When it goes wrong, and it often does, the consequences can be serious.

The DevOps, Continuous Delivery and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) movements have revolutionised our ability to deliver software regularly and reliably. Unfortunately, many of us have not adopted the associated practices for our databases.

There are, however, tools and techniques (technical and cultural) to implement Database DevOps, aka Database Lifecycle Management (DLM), allowing us to manage SQL changes efficiently and safely.

Who is this course for?

DevOps is about bringing dev and ops folk closer together, so this course is relevant whether you are a developer, a DBA or anyone else who plays a role in writing, testing or deploying SQL Server schema and data changes.

Course content

• Introduction to Database DevOps/DLM
• Source control a database using Git/VSTS and Redgate
• Different approaches: model vs migration / shared dev DB vs dedicated dev DBs
• Working in teams, managing conflicts
• Working with static data
• Introduction to continuous integration
• Automating builds and packaging databases with PowerShell, TeamCity/VSTS, NuGet and Redgate
• Continuous delivery to an integration database
• Production ready automated releases (automation while keeping DBAs happy)

What to bring

Bring a laptop – each attendee will be provisioned with a VM set up with everything they need to source control, build and deploy a database.

We’ll use Git and TeamCity by default. If you would prefer to use VSTS for source control and build automation please be ready to use your own VSTS subscription. (You will need to configure an agent on your VM for the day).