Category: Deployment

Ginger Grant argues in favor of deployment processes:

All sorts of things can happen when one person writes and deploys. I know someone who worked in the IT department for a large cell phone company. At the time, working there meant free phone service. One of the devs was a heavy user of the free phone service and so was his large extended family. His job was to maintain the billing code. After several questionable incidents at work, HR got involved and he was perp walked out of the building. Due to the circumstances surrounding his departure, his cell phone accounts were checked to ensure from this point on, he would get a bill. Although his account showed a number of active phones, his balance was always zero. The code in source control was checked and there was nothing in it which provided a reason why his bill was zero. Upon further investigation, my friend noticed the version number in production did not match the version number in source control. The code in source control was compiled and a huge balance appeared for the former employee. If someone else had deployed the code in source control, this chicanery would not have been possible.

This is an interesting read, so go check it out.

James Anderson is starting a series on continuous integration:

I had been using source control for years but it’s always felt like a tick box exercise that I was doing because I had to. I had never used it to review old versions to see where code went wrong or to quickly roll back changes if I decided I no longer wanted to go in a certain direction with the code. I never felt like I was getting anything back from using source control. Sometimes it takes a problem to arise for you to see the value of a solution.

In 2015 I started to inherit the code base for our internal maintenance database, the UtilityDB. This database is used to store performance metrics and to manage tasks such as index maintenance and backups. This database is installed on all of our instances.

This first post is an introduction to the series, and it looks like he’ll cover some heady topics.

Richie Lee shows how to use MSBuild to deploy a SQL Server database project:

What is happening is that when a project is built in Visual Studio some targets that are external of the whole process that were installed as part of Visual Studio are used as part of the process. Obviously, when we run MSBuild via cmdline, we are not setting the parameter “VisualStudioVersion”, because this is pretty much a “headless” build. So the sqlproj file handles this by setting the parameter to 11.0, which is pretty horrible. Given that projects are created in Visual Studio, I would’ve felt that the version a project was created in would be baked in as the default, as opposed to just some random version number. At the very least,  a warning that a default version number has been set would come in useful, especially as this is 2016 now and the sqlproj files default to 2010 targets.

Fortunately, Richie has the answer to this issue.

Dave Mason implores us to think of the installation:

Every tsql command in your SQL script(s) has the potential to fail. It’s important to catch and handle tsql errors so that they don’t cause the entire installation to fail. This will require a lot of defensive, resilient, fault-tolerant coding on your part. Here’s an example for creating the database. Note the emphasis on permissions, which I touched on in another post.

This is important advice if you send installation scripts to customers (even if you’re using a packager to generate an install EXE).