The mainstay of my presentation material this year has been my deck on continuous integration, Docker and Jenkins. For people who have not had the chance to see this presentation or have seen it and wanted to get some more context around it, I have written this first in a series of posts. Much, in fact just about all of the material in this post features in other posts on my blog. The aim of this set of posts is to present the material in a more digestible manner for people who might not be fully fully familiar with Docker and Jenkins.
This first post will cover an introduction to Jenkins and use of the “Sidecar pattern” for deploying DACPACs to. Subsequent posts will expand on this to include:
- Multi branch build pipelines
- Parallelism
- Unit testing with tSQLt
- The management of database state via Docker volumes
Many people in the SQL Server community have displayed a great interest in containers, only to be left scratching their heads thinking “Well, that is nice, but what can I practically use them for ?”. In my humble opinion, spinning up SQL Server inside a container as a deployment target for a continuous integration pipeline, is one of the, if not the best ways to leverage SQL Server and Docker.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the series.