Our co-founder and CTO, Yaniv Yehuda was recently published in the latest CM Journal from CM Crossroads.  Yaniv wrote extensively about the challenges facing organizations today when dealing with the migration of databases as a critical part of their overall software release management process.  While most organizations today have developed or implemented solutions for moving code, the database poses additional challenges and existing software configuration management tools and capabilities have not been extended to this layer.

In the article Yaniv proposes a number of key changes that can be made to significantly improve control and work processes related to database change management and migration.  The proposed changes are centered around the creation of a “staging” environment as the preferred approach.  While there are additional costs associated with this approach, the savings, coupled with an automated approach to the actual migration between environments are significant.  This approach can also significantly improve the number of bugs found in earlier stages, while drastically reducing the rate of malfunctions that may appear during the migration to production.

dbMaestro TeamWork is the only solution available today that allows for the complete monitoring and synchronization of database development teams and DBA’s as part of the overall development life-cycle.  dbMaestro also provides a central versioning repository that enables users to analyze and compare all database objects, highlighting changes between different versions and ultimately automating the deployment of database changes across environments. 

You can read the full CM Crossroads article here.  For more information you can also visit the dbMaestro TeamWork pages at dbMaestro.com.  We look forward to continuing and expanding the dialog relative to database change management.

A couple of months ago I watched a webinar put on by Agile Journal and Serena. This webinar demonstrated Serena’s Dimensions CM and it’s ability to support parallel streams development and the Agile process.

This got me thinking… dbMaestro TeamWork provides a set of tools that support a similar process for Database Development.

It occured to me that SCM and a streams development process for database objects can be the next logical step. A DBA/development team working on objects (tables, triggers, stored procedures, etc, etc) in the database would definitely benefit from a similar, streams-based approach (maybe even more so than the developers working on the source code).

In particular, the TeamWork Deployment Manager would allow the developers to manage the streams process in a very controlled and repeatable manner. Deployment Manager is very good at both the deployment to the streams and (more importantly) the merge process where several streams need to be merged back into the main trunk. Because Deployment Manager does the merge on an object-by-object basis, this would greatly simplify the merge process.