User profile for Kendra_Little

Hi Peter, This is a really great question, and I think we can develop some good content around this concept, and maybe even go a little farther. I think there are a couple of clarifying questions that might help me get my head around the best way to think through this. 1) How many total environments are in the mix outside of production? In other words, after the integration environment, is there a QA or Staging environment that things get deployed to before production? The reason I ask is that if we don't have another environment in the pipeline before production, then it may become more important to "reset" the integration environment and then only deploy feature 2 to it. (Even if the two things are feature isolated, the application might have some sort of dependency we wouldn't find without doing this.) 2) My second question was if we had the option to use something like Clone or a snapshotting tool to reset the environments in the scenario. It sounds like we do in this case, so I will pull that into consideration. 3) Are you working primarily with SCA in Visual Studio or SSMS? If it's SSMS, then I'm curious if you've updated the plugin since Sept 23rd -- there was an update in that release which helps with removing migration scripts in terms of the schema model. (Visual Studio already had the ability to handle deletions of migration scripts.) Thanks very much for the thoughtful question and looking forward to working through this scenario more on Monday. Have a great weekend. Kendra / comments

Hi Peter,This is a really great question, and I think we can develop some good content around this concept, and maybe even go a little farther.I think there are a couple of clarifying questions tha...

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Hi Peter, Thanks for the extra info. As you're off to the mountains, I think I am going to collect up info as I go and post it back in one piece, rather than putting in a load of smaller updates which might become quite disjointed between big picture things and more detailed things. Putting myself a reminder in to make sure I update here this Friday with what I have together at that point. Have a really good holiday! Kendra / comments

Hi Peter,Thanks for the extra info.As you're off to the mountains, I think I am going to collect up info as I go and post it back in one piece, rather than putting in a load of smaller updates whic...

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Hi, I was able to do a little more testing today, and found that if I set a schedule on the artifact in the release pipeline, then it will automatically run the stages defined if I leave the stages without a schedule. In other words, if I want the whole pipeline to run then I can put a schedule only on the artifact and I don't have to also put a schedule on the stage. I tested this by adding multiple schedules for one day, and that worked. It looks like it will work for multiple days per week but not enough time has passed to "prove" it. One note-- to get new changes to a branch to flow through, you will need a build to run to produce a new version of the build artifact to pass off to the release pipeline. Otherwise we will just be deploying the last artifact which is available for this pipeline. I'm guessing you might already have that covered but just mentioning it in case that's not rigged up yet. Cheers, Kendra / comments

Hi,I was able to do a little more testing today, and found that if I set a schedule on the artifact in the release pipeline, then it will automatically run the stages defined if I leave the stages ...

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Hi, Quick question -- from the screenshot it looks like the schedule is being set on a specific release stage using the classic release pipeline in Azure DevOps. Do you have a scheduled release trigger set on the Artifact? I'm not an expert on this / haven't experimented much with schedules in Azure DevOps, but my theory is that you need a schedule to create the release on the artifact, and then if you want to control the flow to stages that the schedule on the stage would refine that schedule, if that makes sense. I'm at the end of my workday here in the UK but am blocking out some time tomorrow to experiment a bit and see if I can learn more. Kendra / comments

Hi,Quick question -- from the screenshot it looks like the schedule is being set on a specific release stage using the classic release pipeline in Azure DevOps.Do you have a scheduled release trigg...

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Hello, SQL Change Automation uses a local database to validate that all your migration scripts can run against a fresh environment successfully -- this is called the shadow database. What's happening here is that when the commands to create a memory optimized table run against the shadow, SQL Server raises an error because that shadow database hasn't been configured for memory optimized tables. There are two different ways you can handle this: Approach 1 - Clone as Baseline If you are also doing a trial of SQL Clone and/or already have Redgate's SQL Clone, you can use the "Clone as Baseline" feature. With this approach, an image of the production database (which you may mask if you're using Data Masker) is used as the "starting point" for the shadow. All of the properties of the production database, like the configuration you have for memory optimized tables, are already present in that image / clone, so they carry through and this automatically works. (Note: with this approach you would only need to create migration scripts for changes you want to make, you wouldn't need to create a migration script for existing objects at all.) Approach 2 - Pre-Deployment Scripts If clone as baseline isn't right for you, then you can use a pre-deployment script to configure database settings (like enabling memory optimized tables) for the verification and build process, which are run against empty databases. With this approach, variables will be very useful. You will likely want to: Have "USE $(DatabaseName) " at the top of the pre-deployment script to set the context to the shadow Use the $(IsShadowDeployment) variable (or some other method of your choice) to ensure that the pre-deployment script only runs against the correct environments. Usually folks only want the database configuration scripts to run against verify and build environments. Note: If you are working with a Pre-Sales engineer as part of this process, they are very skilled at helping folks with this as well. Hope this helps, Kendra / comments

Hello,SQL Change Automation uses a local database to validate that all your migration scripts can run against a fresh environment successfully -- this is called the shadow database. What's happeni...

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Hello, Apologies that @codegumbo 's question back in September was missed. We have some automation in place to try to help us make sure we get to these questions but it looks like something went awry in this case -- we're checking into that separately. I suspect that in this case the projects are authored in a SQL Change Automation Project, so I'm going to answer that way, but please let me know if you're using SQL Source Control. The first thing that I would look at is the Drift report. Are there objects in the target database which have diverged from the code in the project? The Changes report is generated by comparing a snapshot of the expected schema at the end of deploying your project (which is captured during a build). If you've had drift occur then that comparison may show things which are unexpected -- the Drift report can help explain it. Kendra / comments

Hello,Apologies that @codegumbo 's question back in September was missed. We have some automation in place to try to help us make sure we get to these questions but it looks like something went awr...

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Hi, A quick update from our side -- I've been chatting with @DanC and some others about options for this today. I've tried out the "PublishHTMLReports" plugin by Laksahay Kaushik, and I haven't been able to get it to work for the changes.html report. The plugin is designed for publishing jmeter reports specifically. It might be possible to get this to work with some code contributions to rewrite some of the key files, I am not sure. We are looking at a couple of other options: If one is using YAML Pipelines, it is possible to add a short bit of YAML to publish the Change and Drift reports as artifacts to the pipeline. This doesn't render the report in the Azure DevOps frame itself, but it does make it very easy to click on the published artifacts associated with a pipeline run and easily download the files and open them in the browser. If one is using Classic Release Pipelines, this requires a different approach. I believe that Classic Release Pipelines still lack the ability to publish artifacts. My colleague is looking at an option to use a fileshare in Azure to publish the latest reports from a pipeline in a way that can be included on an Azure DevOps Dashboard. This approach could fit well with Classic Release Pipelines. Do you already have a preference about whether you plan to use "Classic" pipelines, or YAML pipelines? ( I think we will be exploring both of the options above as time allows -- there is no wrong answer here. Just curious which feels like it might be the best fit of the two, if either.) Cheers, Kendra / comments

Hi,A quick update from our side -- I've been chatting with @DanC and some others about options for this today.I've tried out the "PublishHTMLReports" plugin by Laksahay Kaushik, and I haven't been ...

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Hi, quick update--- @danielpottenger was kind enough to do a video explaining this as well, it's here: [image] https://youtu.be/-rZxLCRrgmI Below the video are the same links embedded in the written answer above (just to clarify that they aren't different info / you only need to look at them from one place). Thanks Dan! Edit: corrected the link [image] / comments

Hi, quick update--- @danielpottenger was kind enough to do a video explaining this as well, it's here:https://youtu.be/-rZxLCRrgmIBelow the video are the same links embedded in the written answer ...

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Thanks @cjoneslib, totally understand. Thank you for the feedback in any case, it's really useful for us to know these things. / comments

Thanks @cjoneslib, totally understand. Thank you for the feedback in any case, it's really useful for us to know these things.

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Hi @cjoneslib and @Shaggy, Thank you for the feedback on this. The structure of the project file within the existing implementation of SQL Change Automation is pretty integral to the implementation, and this would be a tough thing for us to change for existing implementations/projects. We are currently working on previews of our next-generation tooling for Database DevOps, and the solution will provide the ability to deploy via migrations without needing to track a list of scripts inside a project configuration file. Would you be interested in joining our research program as we develop this tool? If so, please drop our team a note at databasedevops@red-gate.com. Cheers, Kendra / comments

Hi @cjoneslib and @Shaggy,Thank you for the feedback on this. The structure of the project file within the existing implementation of SQL Change Automation is pretty integral to the implementation,...

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