Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

We recently sat down with James Phillips, Senior IT Leader, to talk about test data management (TDM) and the growing attention it’s getting from the senior IT leaders. It’s been prompted by the recognition that provisioning test and development environments with realistic production-like data improves the quality of code being developed, reduces errors, and deliver new features to customers faster.

Redgate Flyway’s January update brings faster drift resolution, AI-powered deployment descriptions, and a look back at everything we shipped in 2025. Plus, we want to hear from you about how you’re managing database changes.

SQL Prompt’s January release brings support for Microsoft Fabric and an exciting new preview feature.

As the new year begins, development teams are looking to build momentum, set clear goals, and establish reliable, scalable processes that will help them deliver value consistently throughout 2026. That’s why many teams are turning to SQL Toolbelt Essentials: a powerful, easy-to-adopt toolkit that helps teams speed up database development, reduce risk, and standardize workflows.

First, I’d like to say how happy and lucky I feel to be working at Redgate on Flyway. I’m one of two Senior Product Managers in Flyway and we’ve been looking for a third to join us. We work alongside the Flyway Group Leadership Team (Group Product Manager, Architect, Lead Designer, and Development Manager) and four amazing engineering teams with embedded designers. We also work with the Product Support, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams.

Teams work on databases across multiple environments (e.g., Development, Test, QA/UAT, Production) and differences can happen in these databases over time. A hot fix applied directly to Production or a quick change applied in Test while troubleshooting are examples of how the schema can diverge from what’s expected. These differences are known as drift and can cause problems with deployments making them unpredictable and harder to troubleshoot.

Prior to working for a software company, I spent most of my career working for financial organizations. I have lots of friends who still do. Talking with one the other day, the question came up, what keeps you up at night? Her one word response was a little surprising: Fraud. Understand, she’s in charge of managing data at a bank. You’d expect maybe uptime, performance, high availability, any of the standard data management worries. Instead, it’s fraud.

Guided Shadow Configuration removes the setup overhead of shadow databases in Flyway Desktop, allowing teams to adopt migrations-based workflows quickly and safely with minimal configuration. A Shadow Database is a disposable, ‘sandbox’ database that Flyway uses to generate and verify migration scripts.

Once more in this series, we’re moving into areas where I’m not entirely comfortable. I haven’t built a PHP plugin and web page, ever. However, we’re going to put the LLM/AI and associated agents to work on this task. As with so much else when working with AI, it all starts with the prompt, so let’s go there.

SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare v16 introduces SQL Server 2025 support and improved credential security. Plus, SSMS 22 integration is coming soon. We have just released a new major version of SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare – version 16. This major version has two big items and one coming soon.