SQL Server 2008 R2 Launch Event – Application Lifecycle Management

Unfortunately I will be unable to attend the ALM presentation later this afternoon, but luckily I was able to catch it in Montreal last week.

When I think of ALM, I think of the development lifecycle of an application – whether it be agile or waterfall or whatever floats your boat – that encompasses all parts of the process.  We’ve had tools over the years that help us manage each section or iteration of the process, but there was some obvious pieces missing.  What about the SQL?  Databases are essential to pretty much all applications that get developed nowadays, yet for a long time we didn’t have much in the way to help streamline and manage the processes of developing database pieces.

Enter ALM for SQL Server.  DBA’s are now given all the tools and resources developers have had for a while.  It’s now easier to manage Packaging and Deployment of Databases, better source control of SQL scripts, and something really cool: Database schema versioning.

I have a story: Sometime over the last couple years, a developer wrote a small little application that monitors changes to database schemas through triggers, and then sync’ed the changes with SVN.  This was pretty cool.  It allowed us to watch what changed when things went south.  Problem was, it wasn’t necessarily reliable, it relied on some internal pieces to be added to the database manually, and made finding changes through SVN tricky.

With ALM, versioning of databases happens before deployment.  Changes are stored in TFS, and its possible to rollback certain changes fairly easily.  Certain changes. :)

That’s pretty cool.