One of our customers told me the other day, how he uses our three-way comparison, and I thought I would share it with you.

He had to generate a deployment script from the development environment to the integration environment in order to run integration tests before releasing the version to the QA team. He used dbMaestro TeamWork^TM Deployment Manager to deploy changes from development to integration environments and found that there are more than one hundreds updates.

He then used our three-way comparison and analyzed both environments in comparison to the base-line (the QA environment). The three-way comparison allowed him to easily find out, that the other teams had already deployed their changes to the integration environment (without notifying him, as required). He told me that without the three-way comparison he probably would have overridden the other teams’ changes and reverted the integration environment back to its initial state, which, of course, would  have ended in code lose and delays in the integration time (and blame-storming for why the integration environment was not ready…). Following the dbMaestro TeamWork^TM Deployment Manager recommendation to “ignore the changes” saved them numerous hours, and critical delays.

The three-way comparison analyses changes between the source environment (the development) and the destination environment (the integration) and also compares each to the base-line environment (the QA, or previous version). dbMaestro TeamWork^TM Deployment Manager highlights the origin of the change: In case the change came from the development – Deployment Manager recommends that you deploy it; in case the change came from the integration – it recommends that you ignore it as it was done by another team; in case all environments are different – you need to merge changes made in the different environments concurrently. Conveniently, dbMaestro TeamWork^TM supplies an automatic merge engine, which can create merged code with a click of a mouse…

With dbMaestro TeamWork^TM Deployment Manager, our customer created his deployment script in just few minutes instead of a whole day (as in the previous releases), and knew exactly how to ignore changes already deployed by other teams – thus saving even more time and damage.