These operations, often predictable and repetitive and completed at scale, make manual DBA expertise inadequate; that is why so many companies have turned to database automation - the automated management of databases.
What Is Database Release Automation (DBRA)?
Database Release Automation (DRA) is an approach to packaging and deploying changes across databases in multiple environments - such as those involved with software development or production pipelines.
DRA (Deployment Release Automation) is an all-in-one solution team in search combining deployment automation, model validation, test coordination, release coordination and release coordination into one holistic process. For fully-automated application delivery to occur successfully, ALL code, including database code, should be entered into version control before being deployed during application release.
Your company isn't alone if it lacks an automated process for automating database releases; many that practice continuous delivery for applications still need to automate database releases as part of this practice. However, that will likely change as database CDs become more essential and advantageous. Recent study results from the State of Database Deployment Survey shed light on an issue hindering manual processes application release: database deployment issues. According to their survey findings:
- Database change errors are a severe problem for 84% of app stakeholders.
- A database schema must be changed for 57% of application changes
- 88% of respondents report that it takes more than one hour to fix these issues.
CIOs cannot allow this trend to persist, especially now that tools and processes have proven their efficacy in alleviating this bottleneck.
Database Automation: How It Works
These database automation tools offer various automation features application code tailored to DBMSs and related operations - these are some of the most sought-after database automation features.
Data Processing
Data processing involves data replication, cleaning and migration tasks to make data more dependable, meaningful, secure and dependable - instantly available for further processing.
Configuration & provisioning
Use this tool to automate the database environment and repository setup for various tasks and phases during Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Following the development, quality assurance, and IT operations requirements, clustered databases provided should be high production environments performing, secure and reliable.
Balance The load
Automating load balancing can significantly boost the performance of your database.
- Then you can get throughput
- Latency
- Resource utilization
Multi-cloud or hybrid infrastructure enables workloads to be distributed evenly among servers for maximum system performance, security and cost optimization.
Protection & Recovery From Disaster
Losing critical information assets could seriously impair an organization's ability to meet regulatory standards and exceed customer expectations, so organizations need risk mitigation strategies to minimize this possibility.
- Database redundancy
- Distributed across geographically disparate servers
- Defense systems that automatically trigger against cyber attacks and compromise
Backup And Restoration
To reduce risks associated with data loss, systems should manual process automatically backup and restore in specific situations, especially in case of network intrusion that could threaten sensitive databases and mission-critical apps. This safeguard is particularly essential in case of a cyber attack which compromises sensitive databases or applications critical for mission completion.
Safety Improvements
Establishing secure authentication and management processes. Enrolling specific databases according to organizational policies regarding access privileges can be tricky, potentially creating security threats if policies must be adequately enforced.
Compliance With Regulatory Requirements
Companies of all kinds must comply with numerous regulations. One such regulation, GDPR, requires anonymizing data before engaging external partners such as third-party vendors can process or use them. Non-compliance could incur fines.
- Steep fines
- Legal Problems
- The loss of trust amongst a privacy-conscious user market
Reporting & Auditing
Automate the monitoring and tracking of database changes and database server information. Organizations can utilize audit databases to understand if their operations, systems and assets comply with regulatory or organizational policies; you can track any discrepancies and take immediate steps to correct them before their consequences disrupt business operations.
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Automate Your Database
DBAs should approach the automation of databases strategically. While organizations are typically left taking an unplanned and reactive approach to managing their database systems due to an absence of automation solutions, DBAs can and should take an assertive and white paper proactive stance towards database administration.
Before automating, keep these factors in mind:
- Waste processes: Automating waste processes only leads to bugs, bottlenecks and cascading processes resulting in added costs and complications.
- Data inconsistencies: Automated rules are designed to identify assets of information automatically. Should the database contain inconsistent or diverging data structures, automated rules will add any inconsistencies when they detect an irregularity or deviation in the structure.
- Database tuning: Before applying parameters to a database, they must be thoroughly understood, researched, tested and benchmarked. This process becomes particularly daunting when creating highly available clusters across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures.
- Simple tasks: Manual procedures may be preferable for simple target database tasks such as database administration, overwriting and testing an automation script.
- Schema changes: Database automation can radically alter both the updating process of databases as well as their dependencies, especially if conflict resolution, configuration settings, permissions and connectivity with other systems are neglected or improperly administered.
Testing automation technology thoroughly is crucial to reduce risks within databases and ensure accuracy and scope limits are identified for potential new automation candidates. Testing early and frequently is also beneficial when identifying scope limits and new automation candidates.
Tracking and managing dependencies among databases and development environment infrastructure components are integral to database automation. Automated scripts that fail to take account of all dependencies can become single points of failure that lead to performance problems, security holes or compliance violations.
What is Database Automation?
Database automation aims to streamline administrative tasks while increasing security and safety. Database automation will reduce deployment errors and boost reliability and speed during change process automation implementation processes, allowing your DBAs more time for tasks like patching or scaling.
DevOps: The Empty Seat
DevOps has revolutionized IT culture. This movement unites application development teams and operations to address any obstacles related to application delivery processes. Speed is essential, yet companies must recognize its potential repercussions for internal processes. Now there is only one seat left in the "DevOps Inner Circle", that of DBA.
DBAs are critical players in maintaining a business's most valuable asset: its database. However, database innovation needs to catch up to agile methodologies for development and database DevOps tools designed for continuous software delivery and updates; some enterprises continue updating databases the old way: through manual means such as upgrades via FTP servers.
- Review of the manual script
- Validation by hand
- Execution by hand
- Specialized initiatives
Therefore, database releases are always delayed by application release cycles, making companies need help meeting customer demands. Therefore it's time for databases and DBAs to become part of DevOps, using database continuous delivery to meet demand and deliver features more rapidly and cost-effectively. DBAs, as part of DevOps, can make teams more productive, save time and money and make work more cost-efficient; DBAs help businesses develop solutions tailored specifically for a client or self-needs using database automation for faster work processes that lead to cost reduction; finally,, businesses have more effective and productive teams when DBAs work more series of tests quickly with automation.
Bring DBAs To DevOps
Before database automation became widely available, developers submitted scripts for review by DBAs, who then validated whether or not they met technical, regulatory and business standards. As release cycles increased rapidly for applications, so did change requests; software consequently, DBAs were overwhelmed.
DevOps was created on the principle of eliminating silos between development and operation teams, product managers being able to communicate customer requirements to developers using epics or theme examples. Hence, everyone is on one page allowing quick updates or modifications that can be coded, tested, and released quickly.
Before application updates and releases are possible, databases must be modified accordingly. DevOps fails in this regard: DBAs must rely on manual, inefficient and error-prone processes to ensure the appropriate changes to their databases have occurred. DBAs can aid database tool evaluation developers in finding and correcting changes that threaten to interfere with a build.
Engaging DBAs earlier can assist developers with writing code with compliance in mind and ensure database changes run more smoothly. DBAs typically enforce regulations to guarantee database changes are smooth.
By breaking down silos and raising awareness of bottlenecks within the release process, teams can more quickly anticipate and prevent dev teams database issues, leading to quicker releases for all and reduced headaches.
DevOps And Database Automation
Not only are faster release cycles beneficial in getting applications out to end users more quickly, but continuous delivery cycles also aim to cut application development costs and person-hours required as database deployment and workload increase.
Each change requires extensive compatibility testing before approval and review can occur, which increases as data repositories become more complex. A recent database management survey cited 41% of respondents taking up to one week before being able to approve database release process changes - DBAs receive multiple change requests daily; with assistance from automation solutions, their workload would grow further.
Automation software that automates databases is essential in helping avoid undesirable results while helping predict how application changes affect databases. DBAs will use forecast reports provided by this DB automation to quickly uncover any problems - rather than having to wait weeks before discovering anything amiss.
DBAs who understand why database automation is critical can save themselves both time and headaches by protecting against mistakes that break builds; protecting teams against spending hours trying to fix errors saves businesses revenue from revenue lost during repairs; automating DBA tasks gives DBAs more room and opportunity for innovation in DevOps Inner Circle environments.
The Benefits Of Database Release Automated
Adopting DRA in your DevOps processes can reap many rewards - provided you select an ideal partner.
- Release applications faster: Benchmarks by our customers have demonstrated how base Enterprise allows users to deploy database changes up to 80% more rapidly than before - release times becoming minutes instead of days when used with your CI/CD process.
- Fewer errors: Errors in database scripts put businesses at risk and are time-consuming to discover and correct. You can avoid errors from being deployed using tools for database automation that simulate each environment's deployment - Datical's customer benchmarks show it can reduce database error by 90%.
- Easy audits:base allows enterprises to obtain detailed information about every deployment of databases across their enterprise on demand by recording this deployment data into a central repository database. Users can retrieve, verify and label database changes before automatically tracking back any associated application tasks that changed automatically.
- Happy, productive and more productive teams: Reduce friction between DBAs and developers by automating mundane manual tasks.
Database release automation has quickly become an increasing trend across companies, eliminating bottlenecks and speeding up application delivery. By automating database release processes, organizations are freed up to focus more on customers rather than internal issues - contact base today if we could accelerate your app or database release.
Database Release Automation Vs. Database Management
Source Control Systems provide the only way for us to be sure of what we are doing and can serve as the starting point of Agile Development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deliver. Their use enables agile developers, CI developers and CD experts alike to use Continuous Build Servers with Source Code Control systems as part of Agile development practices; their source code then transforms from text into machine instructions during builds which allows it to remain permanently linked with applications using tags so it can easily be recreated later at any point in time.
Our database change process currently lacks source control; instead, we rely on manually checking in DB scripts. With Toad Team Coding's Check In / Out feature during development, DB objects can be added or deleted during builds as desired; once complete, you will have both an application ready to deploy automatically and SQL scripts ready for manual deployment. However, manual deployment of databases remains the sole solution available.
Unable to accurately ascertain whether changes you've made have taken hold in the database without manual review is no way of success, nor requiring manual DBA intervention for every change you attempt to implement.
Use one source repository for changes made in both application and database codes to improve database control; that way, you create one central place that informs of what changes were included in a particular release of databases, and software versions go with each schema version - an ambitious goal in some organizations!
Database Release Automation
Database Release Automation offers the solution. Database automation automates our databases without human interaction; unlike web servers or applications, databases differ in that their structure changes frequently and cannot simply be destroyed and recreated with different schemas. If we did so, data would likely be lost as databases change daily.
Database Release Automation requires striking a balance between safety and speed. Use cases should be included in every evaluation to test if an automated deployment can take place successfully, with particular attention paid to selecting any difficult and painful schema changes from last year to automate; also remember renaming tables where possible or applying any applicable conventions or styles during changes; when looking at likely failure points make sure DRA tools can detect those as soon as they happen - for more details read "Database Source Control Enables Agility Applications."
The Best Database Automation Practices
Reviewing and testing database changes are the most time-consuming DBA tasks. Many of these tasks can be automated by database automation. DBAs must follow best practices for database automation testing. These best practices include the following:
Select The Processes You Want To Automate
Deliberate on which processes require automation. You should consider which tests take time and require lots of data collection.
Early And Frequent Testing Is Recommended
As soon as possible, begin testing. Early and frequent testing will enable you to uncover more bugs while providing opportunities for automated testing.
Choose The Best Database Automation Software For Your Requirements
On the market are numerous tools designed to automate databases. Consider which options would fit your current technology and platform while giving flexibility and freedom to your testers.
Using Error Logs And Tracking
Logging and tracking errors might be challenging, but it can help identify problems as your database automation expands.
Automate Your Processes To Manage Dependencies
Your database automation system may become increasingly complex and can be protected by appropriately setting dependencies.
Database Release Automation: 6 Reasons To Get Started
Software releases can present unique challenges. Finding their cause might require multiple iterations attempts before finally pinpointing one; once fixed, your release could still take longer than anticipated.
Database Release Automation offers the solution: quick and safe database updates are achieved quickly using its tool. DevOps-esque database management is executed instead. With it comes DDL/DML changes made internally that ensure optimal database operation - perfect for DevOps!
Database automation provides similar benefits as application release automation; however, its adoption does not need to come after its adoption. Datical customers had often adopted DRA before or regretted doing ARA first due to database changes being an obstacle in fast releases; DevOps applied to databases has immense value; through self-service automation processes, we were able to reduce this process from taking ten days of manual labor down to mere seconds!
There are six significant advantages of automating database releases:
- Save time by reducing the number of database changes: DRA tools offer many advantages; when considering them for evaluation, they must be evaluated according to this principle. Timing out DRA processes can make for an invaluable evaluation process.
- Reduce the time you spend on script reviews: Any data-repository analysis (DRA) which necessitates a three-way comparison of your changes will only create problems and waste the valuable time and talents of data professionals who should instead focus on more beneficial activities rather than acting as helpdesk staffers.
- Decrease production errors: As long as you adhere to a consistent procedure for transitioning from Dev to Production, high consistency will result in minimal errors and faster repair resolution time. Catching errors early allows cheaper and quicker solutions.
- Save time with audits: 3-Way comparison is only valid against losers, not winners. When audit time arrives, capture and send reports via email in under 30 seconds without manually verifying changes - that's unacceptable.
- Improved corporate governance: Automating standards result in 100% compliance; use Robocop when updating database updates.
- Access to the database status: As part of their obligation for transparency and communication, DRA tools must include an audit trail which indicates when, what, and why a change occurred. To help foster openness and effectiveness.
Database Release Automation Strategy
Database Release Automation or creating the DevOps Database can be easily implemented into an organization's strategy to deliver impressive results. What you should keep an eye out for, however, is any adverse repercussions this strategy might bring with it.
- Standardization of processes: Database Release automation enables you to impose the same release process across Dev and Test environments through Production. DRA uses one consistent mechanism and process for software releases without human involvement.
- Rules Automation: DRA enforces corporate, regulatory and technical standards. For example, one technical standard could stipulate that an index should not exceed three columns; any change containing four will be rejected automatically, just like when using cases fail.
- Change Simulation: Predicting and understanding the impact of proposed database modifications helps provide environmental transparency and code review of proposed changes.
- Improved auditing: Changes that persist across environments, with details about who requested each modification and its location, can provide invaluable audit use cases such as SOX Compliance.
- Version Control for the Database: Just as applications should be created from scratch for deployment into newly established environments, databases should also be designed from the ground up for deployment into newly created ones. Doing this requires not restoring database dumps from other environments, as this does not provide insight into changes that have taken place and cannot recreate an environment with specific release levels.
Combining Database Release Automation : Top 4 Reasons
Software can transform industries across healthcare, finance and retail; companies must learn their applications effectively to remain competitive in this fast-moving world of software development. The software world moves at lightning speed.
Companies are adopting faster, iterative development processes to expedite time-to-market. Agile methods have taken over from outdated waterfall methodologies; as for infrastructure investments, companies are investing heavily in cloud technology and modern architectures to increase efficiency; some even combine both approaches by adopting DevOps - investing in tools like continuous integration and infrastructure automation for even faster speeds of development and deployment.
Data has become a source of contention as companies adopt application release automation (ARA), hoping to speed up software delivery rates. Long neglected, data has long been one of the weakest links in any toolchain - most companies still deploy database changes manually, which ties down development teams, many try supporting agile environments using decades-old database management processes - the equivalent of mounting an expensive Ferrari with Model T rubber tires! Putting too many tools onto too few hands leads nowhere quickly.
Subverting databases has many unintended repercussions; to stay afloat and ensure maximum productivity for your business. Automating it may prove advantageous; explore its impacts in four key areas.
Addition Of DBAs: Cost
Do you rely on database administrators (DBAs) for upgrades across releases? If that's the case, additional DBA hires might also help increase the application release rate; at least 20 DBAs might be necessary if 200 weekly changes need to be implemented.
Your company will require more managers to oversee all these DBAs, along with extra resources required for infrastructure maintenance, more training spent and taking into account the additional time it may take for these DBAs to reach productivity equal to that of the initial 10 DBAs - costs can quickly accumulate when compared with automation savings.
Making Mistakes And Increasing The Risk
No matter the number of DBAs at your disposal, mistakes will inevitably happen. Every review and deployment relying upon human skill, reliability and dedication leads to mistakes that lead to less-than-machine-like reliability resulting in applications failing significantly, misbehaving or even crashing altogether.
Human contact increases data security and integrity risks. Grants embedded within stored procedures present numerous opportunities for error; it could be intentional or accidental that expose data or derail an application altogether.
Diminished Productivity
DBA delays can have ripple effects throughout your development process. Both development and QA departments become idle while waiting for updates to be approved and implemented; our customers have reported spending 5-11% of developers' time waiting on schema updates versus having manual version control of their database; automating release can increase productivity significantly.
Opportunity Cost
All these factors add to delays in release, development and testing; applications cannot do their intended tasks until released into Production. It can be costly not having an application prepared for Production, whether new functionality or features need updating; you are correct if you think application release cycles have accelerated; database automation would speed things up significantly in this respect.
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Conclusion
Automation allows companies to break out of the current manual DB deployment stalemate. It improves performance while freeing DBAs, DBA staff, developers, testers and testers up for other crucial projects.
Automating database deployments reduces human errors and enhances data security, application performance and reliability - in other words; database automation can speed up application production more effectively and rapidly than human methods can. Combine database deployment automation and existing ARA software together, and you may discover massive benefits; organizations could save millions by taking this route.
