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:
For the demo section I walked through the set up I blogged about last week with SQL Source Control connecting to TFS (documentation here), TeamCity running the Red Gate SQL Automation Pack and the open source tSQLt framework to carry out the build, generate a deployment package and run some tests (instructions here), and Octopus Deploy running the SQL Automation Pack to deploy the package to my testing and production environments (instructions here).
You can also view the slides on the Red Gate SlideShare page where we have posted a bunch of other slides from Red Gate talks at other events.
Learn more…
If you would like to learn more about any of the four stages:
- Database source control
- Automated database builds
- Automated database tests
- Automated database deployments
You can find lots of helpful articles and tutorials here:
The most important thing…
If you take away one thing from these slides, please let it be that your organisation needs to tackle the problem of delivering and maintaining software/database updates as a team. That team includes project management, development and operations. If different teams are not communicating with each other regularly you will face problems – no matter how good your processes or tooling. It is often in the transition phase between these groups that we find bottlenecks and mistakes that detrimentally effect your organisations ability to deliver and maintain code.
If you would like to read more about that, you might like a post I wrote last month where I correctly guessed two of the world cup semi finalists (but I didn’t quite predict the teams that would play in the final): Don’t be a brick in the wall. This post also includes a 1970s classic rock metaphor. 🙂
Alternatively, I am currently about half way through reading The Phoenix Project, “a novel about IT, DevOps and helping your business win”. It’s proving an entertaining read and a much more fun way to learn about some of the underlying ‘Toyota Way’ or ‘Lean’ ideologies that underpin Continuous Delivery and DevOps. I highly recommend it and might even decide to write a review for this blog when I’m done.
More speaker sessions…
I’m going to be delivering this talk at a few more events in the coming months so if you or any of your team want to come along let me know and I’ll give you the details.