Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

I work as Director at ThoughtWorks in the database and DevOps space. I’ve been here for 20+ years and I vaguely remember my first project at ThoughtWorks in 1999 when we had just started using Agile software development practices. The basic challenge we faced was how to move database changes at the same pace as application code and keep them in sync so that deployments would work. At the time, we had to invent all the tools, processes, and techniques that we needed.

At Redgate, we strongly believe that all databases should be managed and orchestrated in the same way, with the same standards of security and quality in releases. For the past few years, we’ve been leading the adoption of database DevOps by focusing on the most challenging parts of the process like version control, continuous integration and making deployments consistent, predictable and repeatable.

Mergers and acquisitions are going on all over the market at the moment … and de-mergers as well, actually. Typically in a merger or acquisition, there’s some knowledge that it’s going to happen in advance. But until the Heads of Terms have been signed and there’s a Transition Service Agreement in place, people don’t really get moving with the activity needed to support the move, particularly on the technology side.

In 2020, Deloitte reported on The four trends that define insurance and showed that the future of the insurance marketplace is going to be significantly different. Life and Property and Casualty insurers, for example, estimated that 93% of their volume already came from propositions that were not offered five years ago. New propositions were expected to keep on rising, with nearly a quarter of investment spend in insurance allocated to new product development.

My blog post from February 1 explains that Redgate took the opportunity to purchase the assets of PASS with the main goal of supporting the community. The PASS association ran for 21 years bringing together a community to connect, share, and learn. The community of course lives on, however the association no longer exists as it once did. Working with SQL Server and the data platform is what unites us all. Data is at the heart of everything we do.

As the manager for enterprise applications and data at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, I face a lot of unique challenges. The university itself has around 25,000 students, 1,000 permanent staff and another 1,000 seasonal staff who assist with key academic sessions. They’re spread out across the flagship campus at Sippy Downs and a number of satellite campuses and research and teaching facilities in other locations.

This question was raised at the recent Redgate Summit: How does the implementation of a microservices architecture affect the implementation of a database DevOps approach? I could even rephrase it a little: Does a microservices architecture affect a database DevOps approach?

Since 2018, over 2,400 SQL Server professionals have provided valuable insights into how they monitor and manage their estates, and what challenges they’re facing, through the only industry-wide survey of its kind. The results of the annual survey have not only benefited the community but also helped us better understand how we could shape our own product development to deliver more value where organizations need it.

There’s no doubt the cloud is having a big impact on the nature and make-up of SQL Server estates. The 2021 State of Database DevOps report from Redgate, for example, showed that 58% of organizations now use the cloud either wholly or in combination with on-premises servers, compared to 46% in the same report a year earlier.