Ryan Booz uses schooling as an extended metaphor for database deployment:
In general, the biggest issues we hit continue to be client customizations to the database (even ones we sanction) and an ever growing set of core-pop data that we manage and have to proactively defend against client changes. This is an area we just recently admitted we need to take a long, hard look at and figure out a new paradigm.
I should mention that it was also about this time that we were finally able to proactively get our incremental changes into source control. All of our final scripts were in source somewhere, but the ability to use SQL Compare and SQL Source Control allowed our developers to finally be a second set of eyes on the upgrade process. No longer were we weeding through 50K lines of SQL upgrade just to try and find what changed. Diffing whole scripts doesn’t really provide any good context… especially when we couldn’t guarantee that the actions in the script were in the same order from release to release. This has been another huge win for us.
This is a view from someone in the middle of the process. Ryan’s group isn’t pushing everything automatically, but they’re building out to that.