Category: Deployment

Ed Elliott has been working on a very interesting project:

What does this do?

Unblock-File *.ps1 – removes a flag that windows puts on files to stop them being run if they have been downloaded over the internet.
.\ContinuousDeploymentFTW.ps1 – runs the install script which actually:

• Downloads chocolatey
• Installs git
• Installs Jenkins 2
• Guides you how to configure Jenkins
• Creates a local git repo
• Creates a SSDT project which is configured with a test project and ssdt and all the references that normally cause people problems
• Creates a local Jenkins build which monitors your local git repo for changes
• When code is checked into the repo, the Jenkins job jumps into action and…

If you check into the default branch “master” then Jenkins:

• Builds the SSDT project
• Deploys the project to the unit test database
• Runs the tSQLt unit tests
• Generates a deployment script for the “production” database

and what you have there is continuous delivery in a box

Click through for a video where Ed shows how it all works.

Ed Elliott has a great post deconstructing the SQL Server Data Tools deployment process:

The first thing to note is the garbage collection, there are like 8 changes to the line so 8 sets of garbage collection that happen which is expensive for a .net app. We get much more processor usage for a more prolonged time and we really start to see some disk activity, write activity just has one peak while the files are written but reading stays quite high throughout the whole process. It could be that it is sql reading from disk (my demo was from a single ssd with a local sql instance) but we can see after the sql cpu settles down the green disk read line stays high so it is unlikely to be pure sqlserver.exe.

What does this tell us?

Well if you have large objects, multi-thousand line stored procs then you better get yourself some serious ssd’s to deploy from. If you have smaller objects then you’ll need CPU and memory – don’t scrimp here!

Check it out.

Richie Lee discusses an alternative to pre-model scripts:

According to the blurb, deployment contributors can perform custom actions when deploying a SQL script. And one such use of deployment contributors would be to alter index builds to be an online operation. Microsoft also have a Github DACExtensions repo, and this is very useful because, and in the interests of full disclosure, I have never written a deployment contributor myself. This is partly because the repo has some very good examples, including the online index issue (this post nicely covers how to make use of deployment contributors.) I know those that have and have explained how they work very well. But I think there are a few challenges w/r/t deployment contributors:

• No one has ever heard of them

• You have to use C#

• They’re not entirely straightforward.

This is a good discussion of deployment contributors, including why we don’t see them more frequently.

Ed Elliott discusses database deployments in uncontrolled environments:

There have been a few discussions on stack overflow recently about how to manage deployments in uncontrolled environments, specifically data migrations. The questions were from an SSDT perspective, I don’t think that SSDT is a great choice for these uncontrolled environments and there are some additional requirements for these uncontrolled environments that need some additional thought and care when creating release scripts (whether manually or using a tool).

Ed has some interesting thoughts here, and I agree with the idea that SQL Server Data Tools deployment scripts are not the best choice when you have people changing schema all around you in unexpected ways.