Cambridge UK, Thursday 17 August – A surprising name has emerged among the finalists in the 2017 DevOps Industry Awards. In the Leading DevOps Vendor category, Redgate Software, known for its database development tools, appears alongside companies more traditionally associated with DevOps such as Puppet and CA Technologies.
The inclusion is an important signal that DevOps, which itself emerged less than a decade ago, is evolving yet further: the database has entered the picture.
The recognition as a finalist in the Awards follows a year in which Redgate has made a determined effort to introduce DevOps to the database.
At the end of 2016, the company conducted a major State of Database DevOps survey to find out what was really going on in database development. With more than a thousand respondents, the resultant report revealed among its many findings that 60% of applications developers were also responsible for creating database deployment scripts. It also highlighted that the biggest challenge to database DevOps was applying consistency across application and database development.
Armed with the knowledge gained from the full report, Redgate set out to demonstrate that, just as DevOps practices like version control, continuous integration, and automated deployments can be used for application code, they can also be used for database code. Particularly if the software that is introduced to ease the processes plugs into and works alongside software already in use for applications.
At the same time, Redgate was developing a new tool to complete its line-up of software covering every part of database development. SQL Clone enables the fast and easy provisioning of database copies for use in development and testing, by creating database copies in seconds, and saving up to 99% of disk space. It thus enables developers to develop and test against production-like environments and get feedback much earlier in the process.
A major step was additionally taken in partnership with Microsoft to extend Redgate’s database DevOps tools beyond SQL Server Management Studio and Oracle. When Visual Studio 2017 was launched, the Enterprise edition included Redgate Data Tools, three free tools which enable developers to introduce DevOps to the database from inside Visual Studio.
Microsoft said of the inclusion of Redgate Data Tools: “Redgate tools are a great option for customers who work with SQL Server and Azure SQL databases because they plug into the software they already use for application development. By including three of these tools in Visual Studio Enterprise 2017, Redgate has made it easier for customers to implement DevOps practices when building, deploying and maintaining their databases. We think this is an important step forward to help companies extend DevOps practices to all parts of their applications.”
The end result of this major initiative is that more and more companies and organizations are recognizing that the database doesn’t need to be the bottleneck when developing applications.
As Simon Galbraith, Redgate CEO, concludes: “We’re delighted to be called out as a leading DevOps vendor in the DevOps Industry Awards. It’s important because it’s a sign that, just as DevOps has matured and become part of the normal conversation, so the database is now being included as well.”
The awards ceremony will be held on October 18 at the London Marriot Hotel in Grosvenor Square.
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