15Jul 2019 by Grant Fritchey 7 Comments

Implement DevOps One Step At a Time

DevOps
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…
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01Jul 2019 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Continuous Learning

Professional Development
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…
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24Jun 2019 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

The Constant and Constantly Changing Role of the DBA

DevOps, Redgate Software, SQL Server
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…
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24May 2019 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Containers: Create a Custom Container

Containers
Creating a custom container is where things get truly exciting. There's actually a ton of work and knowledge around this. To start with, I'm going to keep it simple. I'm going to create a container with a database & some data and a couple of general customizations. From that, we'll create our own container. To understand why I've got a series on containers, read here. Setting Up a Custom Container To start with, I'm going to spin up a container with nothing fancy: docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' ` -e 'SA_PASSWORD=$cthulhu1988' ` -p 1433:1433 ` --name DockerDemoTemplate ` -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2019-CTP2.5-ubuntu With this running, let's connect up and make some changes: USE master; GO CREATE DATABASE CustomContainer; GO USE CustomContainer GO CREATE TABLE dbo.CustomTable (ID INT IDENTITY (1,1) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,…
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23May 2019 by Grant Fritchey 4 Comments

Containers: Working With Volumes

Containers
In the previous two posts on containers I showed how use Docker commands to get an image and create a container. This time, we're going to create a container again, but, we're also going to create a volume so we can do some fun stuff. For an understanding of why I'm doing a series of blog posts on containers, read here. Docker Volumes You can create a container with a volume, or local, persistent storage. The usage is really simple: docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' ` -e 'SA_PASSWORD=$cthulhu1988' ` -p 1450:1433 ` --name DockerDemo17vol ` -v sqlvol:/var/opt/mssql ` -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest This will create and kick off a new container based on SQL Server 2017. Nothing to it really. If you get the IP address for the machine, you can connect to…
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22May 2019 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Containers: Creating a Container

Containers
In yesterday's blog post we pulled SQL Server images in preparation for today's blog post where we create containers from those images. If you haven't already, get Docker installed and follow the instructions here to get at least one image on your machine. If you're interested in why I'm talking about containers all week, read this. I'm using all PowerShell commands to control Docker. Docker Run You can use 'docker create' to create an image and then start it up. However, we can just get started running a container from one of the images we downloaded yesterday. We can just simultaneously create and start the container using 'docker run': docker run -e 'ACCEPT_EULA=Y' ` -e 'SA_PASSWORD=$cthulhu1988' ` -p 1433:1433 ` --name dockerdemo ` -d mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest Let's break this down a…
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21May 2019 by Grant Fritchey 5 Comments

Containers: Getting an Image

Containers
I'm working with Docker running on Windows or Linux. There are other ways to do this, but Docker seems to be a pretty strong standard. I'll leave it to you to get Docker installed on your system. Go here to get the appropriate installation. I explain why I'm learning Docker and containers here if you're interested. Docker Pull The first command you have to learn is 'docker pull'. You then have to supply something for it to pull, an image that will be used to create your containers. I'm using Powershell for the commands I'm posting this week. Here's how you get an image with SQL Server 2017: docker pull mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest Assuming you have Docker installed and running, you should get an image downloaded. Depending on your network bandwidth, this…
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20May 2019 by Grant Fritchey 11 Comments

Learning Containers

DevOps
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…
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13May 2019 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

DevOps Is About Communication

DevOps
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…
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22Apr 2019 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Data Breaches: All Your Fault

DevOps, Redgate Software
One part of my job is to understand the compliance landscape. This means that I read a lot about the GDPR and related similar laws. I also have to read a lot about data breaches in order to understand how and where laws like the GDPR apply to them, and how they happened so that I can better prepare people through good DevOps practices to prevent them. The more I read about data breaches, the more I realize: It's You. It's your fault. Don't believe me? Let's walk through a few recent data breaches together. Passwords? We Don't Need Stinking Passwords. The Collection #1 data that represents 21 million unique email addresses and passwords for a combination of up to more than 700 million, was found by Troy Hunt... on…
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