Group exercises beginning around the room Steve Jones and I had a great time today talking about source control for databases and release patterns for performance and availability in Seattle. We had a great group of folks who asked terrific questions, made thoughtful comments, and interacted throughout the day. Here are some links and resources from the day… Suggestion for configuration option to make SQL Server Developer Edition act like Standard Edition This has been requested by the community for many years, but now is the right time to please vote up this suggestion. After all, Microsoft just made Transparent Data Encryption as well as a whole slew of other cool things available in Standard Edition in SQL Server 2019. Things have really changed in Microsoft, and your voice matters — voting and commenting helps! The unnecessary evil of the shared development database Troy Hunt‘s amazing post from 2011 is…

I am living the dream, y’all: yesterday I was finishing up my workday and needed to record a video, but realized that our puppy had spent enough time in her crate for the day already. So, I did the obvious: she’s my co-star in the video. This is what YouTube is for, right? In this video, Freyja the puppy and I talk about a recent workshop which I facilitated at the IDC DevOps conference in London. We cover: 01:45 The workshop methodology: about the Lightning Decision Jam Session, by AJ&Smart / Jonathan Courtney. I think this is a great format, and you may want to use this yourself for a workshop with your team (on any problem-solving topic)05:33 Key findings from our group about how to overcome the top obstacles to Continuous delivery for databases A transcript of the session is below the video. Transcript (edited a bit for clarity)…

Here’s a quick post on something simple which stumped me for a while, in the hopes that search engines help someone else who gets confused in the same way. Recently, I was doing a bit of work in Azure DevOps Services, preparing a demo for an upcoming webinar about Redgate’s solutions. (Shameless plug: the webinar is free.) Part of the demo does the following magic, using a branch policy and pull request automation trigger, combined with some of Redgate’s extensions: Builds/validates database codeCreates a lightweight clone of the “production” database (I’m using a copy of StackOverflow, thanks Brent & the folks at Stack)Creates a release artifact summarizing the changes that’ll be deployed to the clone, exports it, then deploys the changes This combination of actions is lovely — reviewers of the pull request have validation that the code builds, they know it deploys successfully, and they can even look at…