What is Continuous Delivery?
Agile Software development deals with the shorter development cycles and frequent releases. This development process offers great benefits to organizations by reducing the overall risk associated with software development.
Continues Delivery is simply a logical extension to Agile software development practice in which the software is always ready for release in a completely automated way. The notion of “always ready” implies that the software code is fully functional, fully tested, and ready to be released if you choose so!. Regardless of being feature-complete or not, unlike in Agile process, every change made to the software in Continuous Delivery approach is releasable.
Continues Delivery comes after Continues Integration practice in which the focus is on streamlining development by integrating code into a shared repository and test code as often as possible to find issues early. The main focus of Continues Delivery is to become even leaner and more Agile by making sure each change is releasable combined with building a process to release with a push a button.
The Benefits for Database
While a database deployment is no different from application deployment, Continuous Delivery for the database is still lagging behind. A recent survey by Idera revealed that majority of DBAs, under questioned, have no automation process in their database deployments and they are still use manual processes.
According to DBmaestro, Continuous Delivery in the database is vital to increase productivity and quality, reduce risks, and speed up time to market. As Yaniv Yehuda, Co-Funder and CTO of DBmaestro said:
“The database creates a real challenge for automation, which is why organizations participate in continuous processes. Scripting database object change scripts into traditional version control solutions, or using “compare & sync” tools can be plain risky from an automation perspective, as the two concepts are unaware of each other. A better solution needs to be implemented, one that promotes Continuous Delivery and DevOps for the database.”
To know more about the importance and the application of CD in database, check out our recent Geek Sync, “In Database Automation We Trust”.