Press "Enter" to skip to content

Category: DevOps

Source Control and Change Management for Postgres

Published 2023-06-05 by Kevin Feasel

Ryan Booz relives an older story:

For those of you that don’t know, those ER tools were really expensive (probably still are for the ones that exist) and only a few developers had access to the tool. They didn’t have a great DX either.

Aside from the lack of automation and ability of our developers to be more integrated into the process, there was always the one looming issue that we just couldn’t reconcile.

If Joe left and joined the circus (see, I got you there), we were stuck.

We knew this was a bottleneck for some time and we had tried multiple times to change the process. Our ability to iterate on new feature development went through one person and a set of 15-year-old scripts. It didn’t match our otherwise Agile process of front-end code and data analysis projects.

Read on for Ryan’s thoughts on database change management. Some of the tools mentioned work with multiple database platforms, whereas others are specific to Postgres.

Comments closed

Publish to Power BI Environments via ADO

Published 2023-05-10 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank deploys a report:

In the first post in this series, I built an Azure DevOps pipeline to automate steps in a Power BI development workflow. The pipeline implemented a very basic workflow – as soon as a developer committed a new report version to Git, the pipeline deployed it immediately into a Power BI workspace.

In this post I’ll be building a pipeline to support a more sophisticated workflow that enables peer review and stakeholder testing.

Click through for the step-by-step process.

Comments closed

Installing SqlPackage for a Deployment Pipeline

Published 2023-05-01 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant uses a deployment tool to install a deployment tool for his deployment tools:

I decided to do this post after some feedback I received about SqlPackage after a series of posts about deploying dacpacs to serverless SQL Pools. For example, my post about deploying a dacpac to a serverless SQL pool.

Because in order to deploy dacpacs to serverless SQL Pools you must update SqlPackage.

With this in mind, I thought I better go through various ways to update SqlPackage if intending to use it to deploy dacpacs to serverless SQL Pools.

Read on to see how you can do this.

Comments closed

Version Control for Power BI Datasets

Published 2023-04-27 by Kevin Feasel

Richard Swinbank improves on a prior version control system:

In the previous post, I outlined a possible workflow for Power BI development, and implemented an Azure DevOps pipeline to show how steps in such a workflow could be automated. To build the pipeline I stored an entire .pbix report file – data and all – in version control, which is a problem for at least two reasons:

  • storing large report files in a version control system won’t scale well
  • datasets may contain confidential or sensitive data which must be kept out of version control.

In this post I’ll look at separating a report’s dataset from its visuals, version controlling the standalone dataset (without data), and deploying the dataset automatically to Power BI.

Read on for the process.

Comments closed

Building an Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline

Published 2023-04-18 by Kevin Feasel

Olivier Van Steenlandt busts out the YAML:

In previous blog posts, I explained how to automate the Database Project Build & Deployment process using Azure DevOps (Release) Pipelines. These blog posts focused on setting up as easily as possible using the Classic Editor.

In this blog post, I’m going through the steps of setting up a build pipeline using YAML.

Read on to learn why the YAML-based approach is the best option for ADO and how to build a pipeline.

Comments closed

Power BI Dataset CI/CD with Azure DevOps

Published 2023-04-03 by Kevin Feasel

Stephanie Bruno does a bit of continuous integration:

There’s a lot of information on how to get around the lack of an out-of-the box CI/CD solution for Power BI datasets, but for me it’s often complicated and I have to read too many pages before making much progress on my own. This post is here to strip it down and provide you with the easiest way we know to enable a bonafide CI/CD process for Power BI datasets with Azure DevOps. The post is still longer than we’d like, but it includes detailed step-by-step instructions to walk you through every part of the process. To save space, we used slideshows for the screenshots, but you can pause them as you follow along.

There are a lot of steps but the goal is a worthwhile one.

Comments closed

GitHub Actions for CI/CD against SQL Server 2022

Published 2023-03-07 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant has a new template for us:

In this post I want to cover performing CI/CD for SQL Server 2022 using GitHub Actions. For a couple of reasons.

First one is due to the fact that last week I was answering a query on the well known SQLHelp hashtag about deploying updates to SQL Server using GitHub Actions. That is when it dawned on me that I had never shared a repository to solely perform CI/CD for SQL Server using GitHub Actions.

Second reason is due to the fact that I wanted to show how to create an SDK-style database project for SQL Server 2022. By Using the ‘Microsoft.Build.Sql‘ .NET SDK for database projects.

Click through for the GitHub repo and plenty of links and information.

Comments closed

Disabling Classic Pipelines in Azure DevOps

Published 2023-03-02 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant shares some thoughts:

In this post I want to share my thoughts about disabling classic pipelines in Azure DevOps. Which I know there are mixed feelings about.

In addition, I want to raise awareness that this is now possible. Due to the fact that towards the end of January Microsoft announced that you can now disable creation of classic pipelines in Azure DevOps.

In other words, you can now disable the use of the GUI-based Classic Editor and the Releases features in Azure Pipelines.

I agree with Kevin here: it’s generally time to bite the bullet on infrastructure as code if you haven’t already. We talk about it in the data platform context a lot (database schemas in source control, repeatable deployment processes, maintaining config files and applying them) and it matters just as much elsewhere.

Comments closed

Rolling Your Own Serverless SQL Pool Database Project

Published 2023-02-28 by Kevin Feasel

Kevin Chant doesn’t let the lack of support for a product limit him:

In this post I want to share how I created a homemade serverless SQL Pool database project.

Because I know people are keen to work this way right now. Mostly due to the comments I received when I covered how to deploy a dacpac to a serverless SQL pool.

By the end of this post you will know how I created a database project for it. Plus, how you can deploy the contents of the database project with Azure DevOps. I also share plenty of links along the way.

Though Kevin did run into some challenges trying to hack in a solution, so it’s not quite as useful as you’d first hope.

Comments closed