Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: Deployment

Pull Requests and Database Projects

Published 2023-01-11 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt continues building out a database project:

A Pull Request is an alternative way of merging branches. Instead of executing the merge yourself, you will create a Pull Request for someone else to revise your development and approve and merge when ok. By doing this you are introducing peer reviewing into your development process. From my experience, using Pull Requests will improve your development quality since someone needs to validate your changes before they can be deployed to a certain environment.

I wouldn’t advise using Pull Requests to get changes in a development environment but I would advise using it to get changes to an Acceptance- or Production environment. By doing this, you can already find issues in an earlier stage than in production.

Read on to see how they work, using Azure DevOps as the example. GitHub pull requests are very similar in nature.

Comments closed

CI/CD and Postgres

Published 2023-01-09 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz thinks about Database DevOps:

At the core, the biggest problem we needed to solve was making our database change process visible to the whole team. We had to modify our processes and the expectations we had of individual people within the team to deliver better, more consistent value at the data layer.

The tools we chose for our circumstances don’t apply completely to PostgreSQL because they were SQL Server specific. But the process and benefits of building a “database as code” mindset within the team accelerated our velocity and quality. And Joe didn’t have the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Ryan includes links to additional resources and tells an interesting story along the way.

Comments closed

Power BI DevOps and CI/CD

Published 2022-12-30 by Kevin Feasel

Paul Turley tackles a difficult topic:

By most estimates, far more than 80% of all Power BI projects are small and performed by one Data Analyst or Developer. We know that Power BI is also used to develop high-volume datasets, models and business reports in full-scale deployment scenarios where DevOps principles are taken very seriously. So, with a significant minority of large-scale Power BI projects fitting into a category where someone might even think about fundamental concepts like version control or team development; what, exactly does DevOps for Power BI even mean when one size doesn’t fit every project?

Read the whole thing. Paul also includes a video on the topic for those so inclined.

Comments closed

Partial Database Projects

Published 2022-12-09 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt doesn’t get the whole cookie:

In this blog post, I will describe how you can get a database in source control partially. You might be wondering why you would do that. Well, let’s start by explaining the use case.

A couple of years ago, I was working for a company where a third-party vendor owned the OLTP system. At that point in time, we were not allowed to change any existing objects or create any new objects in the existing schemas. Though, we were required to be able to transfer the data from the OLTP system to the staging environment of our Data Warehouse. To do so, the third-party vendor created a schema in the database where we were allowed to create views and stored procedures to be able to get the data we needed.

Read on for an example of how this might work, as well as important database project settings you’ll want to change in that case.

Comments closed

Deploying Database Project Changes

Published 2022-11-23 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt continues a series on database projects:

In a previous blog post (Database Projects – Merging changes), we successfully merged our feature branch into our development branch. Now, as a final step in our development process, we want to get our changes deployed to our development environment.

In this blog post, we will go through the process step by step to execute a manual deployment. We will take a look at what happens behind the scenes, how deployment works and we also will take a look at Publishing Profiles.

Check out that process.

Comments closed

Merging Database Project Changes

Published 2022-11-11 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt feeds changes into different branches:

When you start development, you create a feature branch, which is a living copy of your main branch where you apply changes during the development phase. As soon as you finalize your development, you want to get these changes to your development environment.

This process is called merging. During the merge process, 2 branches will be combined. At this point, we want our feature branch to be combined with the development branch.

Click through to learn how it all works.

Comments closed

GitHub CI/CD for Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-11-03 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant does a bit of CI/CD:

In this post I want to show how a GitHub CI/CD experience for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 can look. Which uses GitHub Actions. Including how to automatically stop and start it in the pipeline.

In my last post I showed a complete CI/CD experience for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 using Azure DevOps.

With this in mind, in this post I show an alternative GitHub CI/CD experience for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 which uses GitHub Actions. Which includes automatically stopping the link before the database update and starting it again after the update has completed.

Read on to learn how.

Comments closed

One Repo for Every Environment

Published 2022-11-01 by Kevin Feasel

Meagan Longoria explains an important part of source control repositories:

I’ve seen a few people start Azure Data Factory (ADF) projects assuming that we would have one source control repo per environment, meaning that you would attach a Git repo to Dev, and another Git repo to Test and another to Prod.

Microsoft recommends against this, saying:

Read on for the citation as well as the practical reason why we don’t want multiple repos. This is true not only for Azure Data Factory but for every development project. You have one repository with branches. Certain branches represent checkpoints where code goes out to a specific environment via use of a release tool (e.g., Azure DevOps release pipelines, GitHub actions, etc.).

Comments closed

CI/CD with Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022

Published 2022-10-21 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant gives us the whole story:

In this post I want to show you a complete CI/CD experience for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022 tables. Which uses a YAML Pipeline in Azure DevOps. Including how to automatically stop and start it in the pipeline.

In a previous post I showed how an easier way to perform CI/CD for Azure Synapse Link for SQL Server 2022. Where you only need to stop the link, update the SQL Server database and afterwards start the link again.

However, the best CI/CD solutions are the ones where you do not do any manual work at all. This includes stopping and starting the link.

And that’s just what Kevin gives us.

Comments closed

Dataset Changes while Deploying in Power BI

Published 2022-10-14 by Kevin Feasel

Marc Lelijveld investigates a what-if scenario:

One of the topics discussed during the session, is the effect of deployments on datasets by using native deployment pipelines in the Power BI service. Deployment Pipelines only deploy meta data from the data model, however specific changes might have an unwanted effect on the data in the dataset in the target stage.

In this blog post, I will further elaborate on several specific use cases and the effect on your dataset in the target stage.

Read on for the results of three separate tests.

Comments closed