Earlier this year I documented how I configured Octopus Deploy to use Red Gate’s SQL CI product to deploy SQL Server databases. Since then Red Gate has released a product that is better suited to the task: SQL Release. The point with SQL Release is that the creation of the upgrade script and other associated deployment resources (more on what…
Tutorials
How to change the default port in Jenkins
tl;dr Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\Jenkins (I’m using Windows Server 2012 and assuming it’s installed to default location) Open Jenkins.xml Edit the –httpPort argument (you may need to edit default permissions) Restart the Jenkins service Now Jenkins will permanently use the new port There are various other solutions via the command prompt but this one just seems so much simpler and…
Deploying databases using Red Gate’s ‘Migrations v2’ functionality
tl;dr: A solution to deploying database changes that diff tools cannot handle Migrations v2 offers a way to deploy complex changes (e.g. table renames, new NOT NULL columns and data migrations) using Red Gate SQL Compare by allowing the user to add custom scripts, using Red Gate SQL Source Control when needed. These custom deployment scripts are combined with SQL Compare generated…
How to Migrate Agents from Red Gate Deployment Manager to Octopus Deploy
I can take no credit for the following article. This was written by a Solutions Architect called Chris Gelhaus who works at Alfa Insurance. Chris does not have a blog but he has kindly documented a neat solution to a potentially time consuming task and allowed me to share it on his behalf. For those that don’t know, a couple of…
Using Entity Framework (or some other ORM tool)? Having performance issues? Here’s a solution.
This week I’m a booth babe for Red Gate at BASTA, a conference for Microsoft stack developers in Germany. This year the theme is ALM (Application Lifecycle Management). With so many people talking about how they deliver their updates I thought that discussions about our SQL Server version control, CI and release management plug-ins would be the topic of the…
Extending the Red Gate SQL Automation Pack TFS Build scripts to create and deploy releases with Deployment Manager or Octopus Deploy
Red Gate recently released a new set of build scripts, specifically designed for TFS Build that allows users to call the Red Gate SQL Automation Pack to build, test and deploy their database. It also makes it easy to publish a NuGet package containing the database scripts to a NuGet repository ready to be picked up by a release management…
Should you put your build server and your release management tool on the same server?
@_AlexYates_ would you recommend having Octopus on a separate server to TeamCity? — Matt Smith (@matt40k) August 22, 2014 I didn’t think 140 characters was enough – so I thought I’d post a brief answer here. The first question that springs to mind is why would you want to put them on the same server in the first place? I’m…
Critiquing myself: My SQL Cambs user group talk
I love to learn and I love to improve. It strikes me that this is one of the key principles behind the drive towards the iterative, lean, agile, [other buzzwords], frequent releases that are symptomatic of continuous delivery. People want to try something, get feedback, iterate, get more feedback, improve, slay the dragon, iterate, get the girl (or guy), iterate,…
Slides: Building an automated database deployment pipeline
Last night I did something new – I was invited to talk at the PASS London SQL Server user group. I presented a talk about database continuous delivery. It was my first official speaker gig. A few people asked me to publish the slides so here they are: Building an automated database deployment pipeline from Red Gate Software For the…
Deploying Red Gate database packages with Octopus deploy
*** This post is now obsolete. You should read this post instead: https://workingwithdevs.com/tutorial-sql-release-octopus-deploy-databases/ *** Red Gate already offers a tool for managing your deployments. It’s called Deployment Manager. However, last week one of our account reps asked me to prepare a demo for a customer who had already spent a lot of time building a deployment process around a different release…