Development teams are under increasing pressure to keep up with the demand for faster delivery of database changes, while ensuring code quality isn’t compromised. This pressure comes from both business requirements and industry expectations. The 2021 Accelerate State of Database DevOps report reveals that the number of teams who are elite performers is increasing year-on-year (making up 26% of those in the study) and these teams have more frequent code deployments and a lower change failure rate.

The desire to release features faster and deliver value to customers sooner is prompting many IT teams to adopt DevOps and Agile practices. By automating parts of the development process where possible and working in shorter cycles to release small changes more often, those teams that do well experience fewer errors and produce higher quality code. All of which is good news, until it comes to the database.

Data masking is a technique of hiding sensitive data from certain users who should not be able to view or access the actual values. This post will look at the reasons why you might choose to implement data masking and discuss both dynamic and static data masking techniques, and when it is appropriate to use each of these.

In the first part of my DevOps 101 series, we tackled the fundamentals of What, who why and how. In this follow-up, I’m going to focus on how to gain buy-in across your organization. That said, who do you need buy-in from? DevOps is the union of people, processes and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users, according to Microsoft’s Donovan Brown. That’s a good explanation, because the focus is not on tooling, or processes, or even just people.

A Contract Solutions Architect for a manufacturing software development company, Tonie Huizer has 20+ years’ experience working with Azure, SQL and other Microsoft technologies. A Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate, he has the knowledge to design, build, test, and maintain cloud applications and services on Microsoft Azure.

Last week we had the pleasure of speaking to SQL Authority’s Pinal Dave to show him some of our favorite SQL Monitor features! Pinal has used – and been a fan of – SQL Monitor since it launched in 2008 (fun fact: it was named SQL Response back then). There are, however, some newer features that Pinal isn’t too familiar with, and we were delighted to introduce those to him.

In the first post in this series, I talked about the challenges for the US Government sector when attempting to introduce DevOps. The sector lags behind others such as Financial Services on every measure, yet the technical obstacles like a disruption to workflows and a lack of appropriate skills are the same.

Organizations around the world are turning to DevOps as a way of working together to improve the efficiency and quality of software delivery and increase value to the business. But what exactly is DevOps and what does it mean for you and your organization? Welcome to DevOps 101. Our new monthly webinar series aims to explain exactly this. Each live session will be hosted by me, Grant Fritchey, starting with the fundamentals to expand your knowledge and understanding of DevOps.