CASE STUDY NMBRS We can now do live database deployments at the push of a button.

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1 CASE STUDY NMBRS We can now do live database deployments at the push of a button. The challenge for many businesses is how to deploy database updates as easily as application updates. Dutch company turned to Redgate s DLM tools and found it simpler than they imagined.

2 The productivity of the team has improved dramatically. We were doing one database update a week, which took almost a full day. Now it takes ten minutes. We can spend the extra time we ve gained developing new features. Luis Abreu, COO/CTO, 2

3 The background Based in Amsterdam with a satellite office in Lisbon, has grown from a payroll administration provider to a market leading HR software company for the accountancy and business markets. Its cloud-based solution is one of the top apps in the Netherlands and Sweden, and currently processes the HR and payroll needs of over 300,000 people per month. With ambitious European growth plans, the company s focus is on efficiency, automation, usability, and continuous innovation. Its mission is to build the best HR and payroll software available online and do so with a horizontal, scalable model so that web and database servers can be added with a minimal impact on overheads. The challenge have been using Redgate tools for.net and SQL development for many years. Optimizing.NET code with ANTS Performance Profiler, for example, is standard practice, as is comparing and synchronizing SQL Server database schemas with SQL Compare. When they reached the number three spot in the Netherlands and realized their software had potential right across Europe, Luis Abreu, the COO/CTO of, knew they had to step up another gear. Their absolute commitment to customer service could not be met if their technology let them down. The.NET platform is supported by a dozen SQL Server databases and it was here that Luis Abreu had a concern. While Agile practices were common right across the development team, handwritten scripts were being used for weekly database updates. The updates were consequently taking a day to complete and were a worrying exercise at best. There had to be a better way. As Luis Abreu says: Once you want to build a scalable cloud app, you need to automate the whole environment, including the database, so that you can scale without additional overhead. We had to be able to cope with more tasks with more tooling. 3

4 Matching the need with the right technology Luis Abreu and his team knew there were two areas where the right tooling would make a big difference. The first was source control. Mercurial was being used to version control the application code and the database code needed to be added to the process. This would reduce errors and make deployments to the live environment easier, help team collaboration and the co-ordination of changes, and keep the database development in step with the application development. Secondly, the laborious, manual way of writing migration scripts had to be automated so that deploying from the development to the live environment was faster, easier, and a lot more reliable. While Luis Abreu was familiar with Redgate tools, he cast his net wide and investigated lots of options. He knew what he wanted to achieve and he had to be absolutely sure the solution he chose could deliver precisely what he needed. In the end, he decided on Redgate. We looked at many migration-based tools and couldn t find anything that was workable other than Redgate, he says. 4

5 Putting the promise into practice Every developer working on developing the databases now uses SQL Source Control to version control their code locally, and then commit the changes to a central Mercurial repository. On each check-in to version control, another Redgate tool, SQL CI, integrates with TeamCity and builds, tests, and packages the database changes alongside the application code. Teams can deploy the changes themselves, literally, at the push of a button, using Octopus Deploy. By plugging into the tools like Mercurial and TeamCity that the team already use, the new way of working has been easy to introduce and has brought with it significant advantages. The number of errors introduced when releasing new code has been massively reduced because the continuous integration process picks up errors much earlier in the process. This in turn has allowed Luis Abreu to triple the number of developers working on the codebase and double the number of users of their application. As he concludes: We ve automated 90% of the process, and we can now scale our application to more servers and markets without increasing our overhead. 5