I love going to SQLSaturday events because I'm always asked questions that make me think. I was just at SQLSaturday Indianapolis (a great event, if you weren't there, you missed out). I was giving a session called "Extending DevOps to SQL Server" (which I'm giving this Saturday at SQLSaturday Providence). I was talking about the fact that I've been involved in successful DevOps implementations and I've been involved in failed DevOps implementations. The question that came up was, "What were the key differences between the failed and successful organizations?" Great Question. Management Buy-In I've seen attempts to implement DevOps strictly from the IT side of things. A relatively high functioning team recognizes the benefits an agile approach that's oriented towards improved collaboration between people that uses automation in support of…
The more you work with containers, the more you just want to work with containers. However, there are still reasons to have a virtual machine for some types of workloads. So, what if you want to work with containers inside a virtual machine. Is that possible? Yes, and shockingly easily. Enable Virtualization In Virtualization I knew from conversations I've had previously that running Docker inside a virtual machine was possible. I just didn't know the details. So, with a complete lack of knowledge, I did the most expedient thing possible: I installed Docker in a VM and started it up. Now, let's talk about my setup for a moment. My laptop is running HyperV as my hypervisor. You have to have some type of hypervisor for Docker to work. I'm…
There is literally nothing I like better than working on automation. Before we had all the cool toys that we have now, I was working on automating database deployments. Now, with all the cool toys, I'm not automating deployments. I'm automating builds, tests, environment setup, containers, multiple database platforms and more. If you want to learn about DevOps, source control, tools, automation, artifacts, testing and more, I've got an opportunity for you. In just a couple of weeks, on Friday, June 16th, 2019, I'll be teaching an all day seminar on database DevOps. There are some seats left, but don't wait until it's too late. Click here now to get signed up. This is the only time this year that I'll be presenting this course in the United States. If…
I've said it before and I will repeat myself on this because it's an important concept: DevOps is about culture and communication, not tools Now, that said, to implement the automation required in DevOps, you're going to have to get into some degree of tooling. There are a whole slew of possible tools to support you: Jenkins, Team City, Octopus and more. All these tools offer excellent solutions with variations on limits, methodologies, etc. You'll need to explore them to understand which ones are best for you and your processes. I've been doing a lot of work lately in another tool, Azure DevOps. Let me show you a little of what I've done. Azure DevOps Pipelines I don't mean for this to be a complete tutorial on setting up Azure…
In preparation for my upcoming DevOps training days (see the bottom of this post for details) and for some articles I'm working on, I've been building all new automation processes for database deployments. In the past, I've been using a fairly simple (and far too simplistic) example to do most of my demos. I haven't built a full process in a little while. OH MY GOD!!! IT'S PAINFUL!!!!! Automation Ain't Easy The easy part of getting your DevOps done is the tooling. I say that all the time because it's true. The hard part is changing your organizations culture to support the level of communication necessary for a successful DevOps implementation. However, easy by comparison doesn't mean just simply easy. There's a lot of work involved and making mistakes early…
In case you can't tell from some of my blog posts, I'm a bit of an advocate for DevOps. I'm extremely fortunate in my employer, Redgate Software, that they are also huge advocates for DevOps. We not only teach it and promote it, and, oh yeah, make AWESOME tools for it, we practice DevOps in what we do. However, this post is not about DevOps. Instead, I'm trying to leverage some of the concepts of DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment, to arrive at some ideas around learning that I want to share. Pi-Hole Yesterday I spent several hours getting the software Pi-Hole set up for my home network. Now, this software really doesn't take several hours to set up. The reason it took me that long is because I hadn't…
I've been working in and around data for over 30 years now. My title has changed a number of times and is poised to change again. My responsibilities have also shifted fairly continuously over that time. Even though it has been more than 20 years since I first took on the title of DBA, some aspects of the job are the same. However, over that 20 years, a stack of new technologies and processes have fundamentally changed a whole swath of what I do. The DBA Song Remains the Same Are your servers online? Are all databases available? Did the data load process run successfully last night? When was the last time a backup was run on this database? I honestly don't care if you're in the cloud, on-premises, or…
I find that I'm using containers more and more to get things done with SQL Server. They're so easy to set up for testing, spin 'em up, do stuff, turn 'em off, done. So, as I learn more and more about them, I figured it was time to start to share that learning here on the blog. First up, I'm NOT an expert on this topic. The two best people I know currently on this are Anthony Nocentino and Andrew Pruski. Those are the people you really should be learning the details from. I'm going to try to start to cover the introductory level of containers, Docker, and, at some point in the future, Kubernetes (maybe) and other orchestrators. However, I know that as my knowledge of how to work…
I spend a lot of time showing how to use tools to automate database deployments in support of DevOps. However, the one message that I always try to deliver with DevOps is that it's fundamentally not about the tools. No, the single most important thing in DevOps is communication. Therefore, the single most important thing in DevOps is people. People Are Good Are there evil people in the world? Unfortunately, yes. Can even good and decent people do evil? Again, unfortunately, yes. However, most people, most of the time, are trying to do the right thing. I would say that you need to arrive at this position first in order to implement a DevOps solution effectively. You can't be all "Developers are EVIL" or "DBAs are mean" or "My SAN…
I'm sure by now you've heard of the GDPR and some of the large scale data breaches that have occurred within it. If you haven't heard of the GDPR, you've been under a rock, or, you're like me, a United States citizen (it's amazing how little we know about this oncoming train). If you're seeing the four letters GDPR strung together for the first time, then you better jump on learning about it right now. Why? Let's string together more letters, CPPA. That stands for the California Privacy and Protection Act. That's a law modeled off the GDPR that goes into effect in 2020 (yeah, nine months). Compliance Isn't Always Spelled GDPR Maybe you're not in an EU country and you don't have any person's data from there. Maybe you…