We’ll spend about a week with you and your team to learn about your current DLM processes and aspirations. Then we’ll recommend some next steps.

Database Lifecycle Management (DLM) is the way an organisation makes database changes and maintains them. The DevOps and Continuous Delivery movements have proven the value of various patterns and practices associated with managing code changes, both at a human and a technical level, for example:

• Collaboration between people with different roles, skills and from different teams.
• Rock solid source control processes.
• Formal (preferably automated) testing and deployment processes.
• Detailed monitoring and alerting.
• Fast feedback loops, rapid iteration, quick cycle time.

At the same time, increasingly stringent data protection regulations such as SOX, HIPAA and the GDPR put various restrictions on us. We need to be able to demonstrate that we are keeping the data secure. The patterns mentioned above will help but we also need to consider:

• Data access controls in production.
• Data masking/cleansing for dev/test databases.

Our DLM Health Check package is designed to show a customer how they can improve the way they manage their database changes. We will not come in and do your DLM for you, because that doesn’t make any sense. We will help you to work more effectively together to achieve your own goals.

Simply put, we will help you to deliver database updates more regularly and more reliably.

We partner with Brent Ozar Unlimited to provide you with the training that you need to get started with Database Lifecycle Management.

DLM Consultants believe in equipping people to manage their own Database DevOps pipelines. Our DLM Workshops are a series of three training days designed to teach the fundamentals of Database Lifecycle Management (DLM). Since we believe the best way to learn is to do, during each workshop every attendee will implement what they’ve learned in their own VM sandbox, hosted by us.

We’ve broken the content into three full day workshops:

• Day 1: Database provisioning and source control Now with Redgate SQL Clone – course outline
• Day 2: Database continuous integration – course outline
• Day 3: Database release management – course outline

Attendees are welcome to attend the full series or just one or two workshops. Each month we’ll run the full series on consecutive days. That way attendees can attend all three in one go or attend one each month, taking breaks to implement and practice what they’ve learned at each stage.

We’ve teamed up with Redgate to create these workshops and we’ll use Redgate’s SQL Toolbelt, along with many other tools including Git, NuGet, TeamCity and Octopus Deploy. We can also provide workshops using VSTS upon request. The principles and techniques, however, are applicable regardless of the software you happen to use. Jan Mulkins (quoted above), for exampe, used SSDT instead of Redgate.

While we do occasionally hold traditional on-site workshops, in order to make our workshops accessible to as many people as possible we run the full series online at least once per month. This reduces costs for everyone, and allows attendees to join from their homes or their offices anywhere in the world.

We’ll help your team set up database provisioning with masked data, source control, and a deployment pipeline. We’ll also train them in how to use it effectively.

You know what you want to achieve, and perhaps you’ve already bought or built some software to help manage the process, but you need some help to get it all working. After all, tools are fantastic, but you need to know how to set them all up and to use them wisely.

DLM Consultants can help. Our DLM Kick-starter package is designed to help you make real progress within a focused, fixed time period. We can’t say exactly what we’ll help you with, because it depends on what you need and how quickly your organisation can move, but we’ll do what we can to help you make some rapid progress.

Principal consultant, Alex Yates, has worked both on-site and remotely with large and small organisations across many geographies and industry sectors. He’s seen the good, the bad and the ugly and he has helped many organisations to take their next step with SQL Server or Oracle DLM.

Our philosophy is not to build your pipeline for you. We will help you to build it for yourself. We’ll pair with you but we won’t touch the keyboard. It is important that your people are able to implement and manage your own pipeline as quickly as possible. If you are dependent on our services for a long period of time, we have not done our job properly.