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Database Deployment with External References

Sebastian Meine and Liz Baron try to untangle the Gordian knot:

Most database developers are dealing with databases that contain external references. Even if the database code is in source control, these external references can make it very difficult to deploy to new environments. In these multi-database environments, tools like SQLCompare and SQL Change Automation do not automatically resolve object-order across databases, resulting in errors during deployment.

One way to tackle this, which works especially well for CI pipelines, is to create facades for all externally referenced databases. A facade in this context is a database with the expected name, with the expected objects, but those objects are hollowed out and do not contain any dependencies. You can compare this concept to an interface in an object-oriented language. Once you have these facades, they can be used in a pre-deployment step, simplifying the rest of the deployment by effectively removing object-order dependencies with these external databases.

This is one of the most painful parts of converting existing databases into model-driven database development. Especially once you start having to deal with cross-dependencies and rapidly-changing databases.