Recipes for Continuous Database Integration

by Pramod J. Sadalage

This is the eBook version of the printed book.

The past few years have seen the rise of agile or evolutionary methods in software development. These methods embrace change in requirements even late in the project. The ability to change software is because of certain practices that are followed within teams, such as Test Driven Development, Pair Programming, and Continuous Integration. Continuous Integration provides a way for software teams to integrate their work more than once a day, and promotes confidence in the software that is being developed by the team. It is thought that this practice is difficult to apply when continuously integrating the database with application code; hence, Evolutionary Database Development is considered a mismatch with agile methods. Pramod Sadalage shows that this is not necessarily true.

 

Continuous Integration changed the way software is written. Why not extend and make the database part of the same Continuous Integration cycle so that you can see integrated results of your application as well as your database? Delivered in PDF format for quick and easy access, Recipes for Continuous Database Integration shows how the database can be brought under the preview of Continuous Integration, allowing all teams to integrate not only their application code, but also their database.

 

This Short Cut presents a recipe for each task that needs to be done. Each recipe starts with a statement of a problem, followed by an explanation and solution. It provides concrete ways and examples to implement ideas in Refactoring Evolutionary Database Design by Scott W Ambler and Pramod Sadalage.

 

Table of Contents

What This Short Cut Covers

Introduction

Recipe 1           Continuously Integrating?

Recipe 2           Extracting Your Database in Scripts

Recipe 3           Using Version Control for Your Database

Recipe 4           Automating Database or Schema Creation

Recipe 5           Creating Objects in Your Database

Recipe 6           Removing Database Objects

Recipe 7           Removing Your Database

Recipe 8           Using the Build Property Files

Recipe 9           Re-Creating Your Application Database for Any Build

Recipe 10         Making It Easy for New Developers to Join the Team

Recipe 11         Integrating on Every Check-In

Recipe 12         Naming Upgrade Scripts

Recipe 13         Automating Database Change Script Creation

Recipe 14         Implementing Database Version Checking

Recipe 15         Sending Upgrades to Customers

Sample Code

Further Reading

About the Author

What’s in the Companion Book

Related Publication

 

Genres: Technical

55 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 26, 2003

About the author

Pramod J. Sadalage, Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks, enjoys the rare role of bridging the divide between database professionals and application developers. He regularly consults with clients who have particularly challenging data needs requiring new technologies and techniques. He developed pioneering techniques that allowed relational databases to be designed in an evolutionary manner based on version-controlled schema migrations.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

This (short) book is beginning to show its age -- while the general principles from which we're reasoning are largely the same, the tools and techniques have evolved from the examples in the book. Manually managing a database version table isn't needed when a tool will do that for you, and using Ant scripts to manage some of the tasks is dated and potentially more fragile than it needs to be given what's available today. Still, this book reinforces database problems and potential solutions in a clear, readable way.

[James Couball · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing earth shattering here. The advice is all good but pretty obvious.