As Agile development increases in popularity, companies have achieved faster time to market, reduced risk, and increased ability to manage changing priorities in their projects.
However, what Agile means for the DBA team is more database deployments more often. This makes it more difficult to manage the environment using manual processes.
The issues involved in Agile development for DBAs were explored in a recent webcast presented by Robert Reeves, CTO, and Peter Pickerill, vice president of products and co-founder of Datical.
Among the most important reasons to adopt Agile development for a database include cross-team collaboration, increased staff productivity, continuous integration and delivery, and enterprise wide access security, according to Datical.
Some of the challenges facing Agile DBAs include dealing with “unforgiving” databases, the tedious work of determining the version of a particular database, and a lack of safe automation.
What’s needed are best practices and tools to support Agile development in a way that scales efficiently, controls operating costs, and reduces risk to the data platform.
“From 2012 to 2014 we’ve seen a borderline seismic shift in how IT is delivered in applications,” stated Reeves. According to a recent poll, the Agile method has almost tripled in that time span. Some of the challenges facing Agile DBAs include dealing with unforgiving databases, the tedious work of determining the version of a particular database, and a lack of safe automation.
A key feature provides Datical performs is reporting, according to Reeves. “Every single action creates a report,” said Reeves. This allows the user to have a complete understanding of who, why, where, and when at all times.
Datical also allows users to run a forecast prior to scheduled maintenance to provide an advance look at the impact of potential changes. Datical also has a “rollback” function which allows for a simple column to be removed all the way to complex custom rollbacks.
“It is all about completing repeatable deployment patterns all the way from dev to production,” stated Pickerill.
This webcast was broadcast on June 18, 2015. To access an on-demand reply, go here.