Posts From Category: agile

In part I we explored the history and goals of DevOps and the Agile movement and the motivations for maturing your DBOps practice. In other words, part I addresses “mindset.” Let’s now look at this in practice and get into the “how” of DbOps, addressing the remaining “skillset” and “toolset” topics. Most crucially this involves not only understanding the tools you’ll be working with but also understanding the database. Poorly planned database changes have the potential to cause extended unwanted downtime and, if they break compatibility with the previous version of your app, can complicate rollbacks. Knowledge of RDBMS internals is crucial to moving “offline-breaking” database changes (database changes that require downtime and break compatability with previous versions of code) to “online-compatible” changes (database changes that do not introduce downtime and can be remain backward/forward compatible with code changes).

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Everyone seems to want agility, and the DevOps movement has provided tools and practices to enable this. While the tools available today are wonderful, there remain unique challenges when it comes to delivering code changes that also include database changes.

I’ve been building database pipelines on-and-off for over 20 years now. The tools have may have changed but the core principles have not. It would be trivial to write a talk, essay or blog post that was just a tour of syntax and an entertaining summarization of the documentation. You don’t need me to read the docs only to regurgitate them for you into prose or PowerPoint. Instead, I’m going to take a holistic approach that encompasses mindset, skillset, and toolset. What I hope will make this work stand apart from similar content out there is I will be writing from the perspective of a (recovering) DBA and share vital insights that are more relevant than ever.

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