dian m fay

Another Phriday in the books, and it's time to see what all happened:

• Hari Kiran offered an introduction to the concepts and processes used in schema evolution with examples showing how to use Flyway, a popular Java-based tool.
• Grant Fritchey discussed what it means to roll a change back, why catastrophic failures are the good kind of failure, and how to work with deployment processes to adapt to failures and roll the database forward to a good state instead of trying to turn back time.
• Michael Christofides wrote about table stakes for database automation and his hopes for better integration of performance testing in automated change management.
• Andy Atkinson ran through the entire prompt item by item! Read it for a detailed look at Rails migrations in situ -- who writes them, who reviews them, what kinds of problems happen, and how to validate successful changes.
• Ryan Booz gave me ERWin flashbacks and proclaimed a decalogue for the aspiring database automator, from the foundational on up. No comment on whether I've ever achieved #7 without painstakingly restoring manual production dumps.
• finally, I covered the ideas powering a few less-usual schema evolution tools.

Thanks everyone for participating, and look forward to Alicja's invitation coming around the end of the month!