DevOps

Jignesh Raiyani
PLE in Windows Performance Monitor

Page Life Expectancy (PLE) in SQL Server

July 17, 2020 by

Page Life Expectancy (PLE) is an age of a data page in seconds in the buffer cache or buffer memory after querying the tables with the loading data page into the buffer memory. Page Life Expectancy value indicates the memory pressure in allocated memory to the SQL Server instance. In most of the cases, a page will be dropped from buffer periodically.

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Timothy Smith

DevSecOps: Security Testing Around Builds and Shared Information

March 11, 2019 by

One big component of DevSecOps surrounding security testing involves how we build and deploy with shared information access of details that may be valuable to an attacker. In order to understand these risks, we must think like attacker who wants to compromise an environment that is focusing on quickly writing code, building the code, testing it, and deploying it across multiple environments. An attacker’s ultimate target will be the highest environment – often a production environment, but some attackers may target lower environments because they may be able to inject code that is deployed to production. In addition, an attacker may only be trying to learn about how an environment is laid out to attack in other ways, such as using social engineering with key information.

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Timothy Smith

DevSecOps: Developing with Automated Security Testing

March 6, 2019 by

A key component of DevSecOps and identical to running unit tests to validate code after a build, running automated security testing after an application has been deployed (such as automated penetration tests) can provide us with a tool that identifies security risks. As we’ve seen recently, there’s been a growth of many companies experiencing information being compromised and with the development culture of “move fast and break things”, I expect this trend of successful attacks will continue. Before we look at our options for automating this testing, we want to be aware of its limits, evaluate the requirements, and consider common designs that are useful.

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Prashanth Jayaram

Continuous Database Delivery (CD) using SQL Server Tools SqlPackage.exe

August 14, 2018 by

A little curiosity on my part led me to research a little further on the available pieces of SQL Server Tools. A cross-platform tool for continuous integration and deployment, called SqlPackage, is part of SQL Server Data Tools. I picked it up because continuous integration, delivery and deployment are now must-have in the modern-day application development paradigm.

We’d talk about the following in this article:

  1. The Database Management Life Cycle
  2. Complexities of the database release management process
  3. Introduction to SQL Server Data Tools and SqlPackage
  4. Using SqlPackage.exe, with examples
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Prashanth Jayaram

Overview of the SQLCMD utility in SQL Server

August 13, 2018 by

This article is aimed at helping you understand the sqlcmd utility. Of course, this is a tool most of us have used it at several occasions given that the tool has been around for a decade now. However, to be a solid starting point, this article contains some examples that help you understand the tool from different viewpoints.

This article discusses the following:

  1. How to enable SQLCMD
  2. A few important points to remember
  3. SQLCMD with scripting variables in SSMS
  4. Passing variables (or argument) as T-SQL and or a SQL Script file
  5. SQLCMD with scripting variables and Windows scripting in SSMS
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Prashanth Jayaram

Getting started building applications using SQL Server DevOps Tools

March 28, 2018 by

This article is part of the SQL Server Tools series, aimed at giving you an idea of the available tools and techniques to build applications using SQL Server tools. The first article of the series covers the rudimentary DevOps concepts and discusses on a high level, the overview of SQL Server tools that can be piped for DevOps operations.

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Nemanja Popovic

SQL Server database continuous integration (CI) Best practices and how to implement them – Testing, processing and automation

January 31, 2017 by

Testing

Test databases should be processed with unit tests

In many shops code is unit tested at the point of commit. For databases, I prefer running all unit tests at once and in sequence against a QA database, vs development, as part of a Test step, in my continuous integration workflow pipeline. Yes, issues would be caught later than at check-in, but continuous integration largely solves this with frequent iterations, including at a commit itself. So the difference between on-check in, unit testing and unit testing a build created on-commit, is simply that the unit tests will be run against a fully re-constituted QA database, vs Development. The previous article in this series is SQL Server database continuous integration (CI) Best practices and how to implement them – Source control. Read more »
Nemanja Popovic

SQL Server database continuous integration (CI) Best practices and how to implement them – Source control

January 31, 2017 by

This article provides for a roadmap to continuous integration and delivery best practices, and along the way demonstrates how to apply these with ApexSQL tools and technologies. In some sections this article is aspirational, as no solution yet exists, but demonstrates our plan, direction and roadmap. As the tools that apply these best practices are released this article will be updated accordingly.

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Marko Radakovic

Understanding SQL Server database static data and how it fits into Database lifecycle management

January 13, 2017 by

What is static data

Static data (aka Code, Lookup, List or Reference data), in the context of a relational database management system, is generally data that represents fixed data, that generally doesn’t change, or if it does, changes infrequently, such as abbreviations for US states for example e.g. ME, MA, NC. This data is typically referenced, extensively, by transactional type data. For example, an customer table would have references to static table for City name, State or province, Country, Payment terms e.g. NET 30 etc.

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Paul Stanton

Automate Delivery of SQL Server Production Data Environments Using Containers

January 12, 2017 by

There has been a lot of buzz about Docker and containers this year, and earlier this Fall Microsoft released container support in Windows Server 2016. WinDocks is a team of former Microsoft engineers, and we released an independent port of Docker’s open source in March of 2016. Full disclosure, I am a co-founder at WinDocks.

In this article we’ll take a look at the basics of containers, and the most popular use by SQL Server DBAs.

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Marko Radakovic

Introduction to SQL Server database continuous integration

January 5, 2016 by

What is SQL database CI?

Continuous integration (CI), in the context of databases, refers to the practice of isolated database changes to be integrated, as soon as they are made and pushed to a source control repository. In the early days of CI, daily integration was a rule of thumb to follow. However, today, it is more common, than not, that database changes are integrated several times a day. Each change needs to pass an established testing plan that executes automatically on detected changes committed to the repository and if everything is ok, changes will be automatically merged using the build script. with the remaining code, into a new build that will be pushed to other environments (i.e. production, QA).

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Régis Baccaro

Continuous Deployment using SQL Server Data Tools and Visual Studio Online

February 2, 2015 by

In the previous posts

Deployment to several databases using SQL Server Data Tools and TFS using a Custom Workflow file
Deployment to several databases using SQL Server Data Tools and Team foundation Server
Continuous integration with SQL Server Data Tools and Team Foundation Server

I have been mostly writing about the interaction between SQL Server Data Tools and Team Foundation Server. Microsoft provides a hosted version of Team Foundation Build Service called Visual Studio Online. The configuration and functionality is mostly the same than what I have previously been writing about but there are some specifics things that we need to be aware when using Visual Studio Online Build Service.

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Régis Baccaro

Deployment to several databases using SQL Server Data Tools and TFS using a Custom Workflow file

January 16, 2015 by

In the previous blog post : Deployment to several databases using SQL Server Data Tools and Team foundation Server I illustrated how it is possible to use TFS and a batch file to deploy a database to several SQL Server instances or to deploy several SQL Server databases to several instances. The main way to achieve that in the previous post was using a batch file. For more information about this technique please have a look at that blog post.

In this post on the other hand I will demonstrate how the same functionality can be achieved using a Windows Workflow Foundation file (xaml) deployment file and Team Foundation Server.

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