CASE STUDY TELECOMS. Calvi - two years with no database-related bugs

Transcription

1 CASE STUDY TELECOMS Calvi - two years with no database-related bugs

2 "Redgate tools save me hours and hours of work each week In the last two years we haven t had any bugs related to database objects at all." Michael Stoop Database Developer, Calvi Michael Stoop is a Database Developer at Calvi, a software provider for the telecoms industry. Calvi uses Redgate tools for Database Lifecycle Management. As a result: For two years they have had no database-related bugs They save several man hours each week on database administration and development 2

3 The context Calvi is Europe s leading provider of Telecom Invoice Management software. Its customers include Siemens, the Dutch police, Schiphol airport, and global telecom providers. 75% of their customers use the software as a service (SaaS) version of Calvi s software. Calvi stores invoices, contracts, bills, and other data for these customers in a SQL Server database which contains 300 tables and more than 1500 other objects. The larger tables can grow by hundreds of millions of rows each year. This scale comes with a special set of challenges, as Michael Stoop, Database Developer at Calvi explains: We have two teams of developers one in the Netherlands and one in India that work on our database. They re also responsible for three web applications and several interfaces and processing engines. We develop using agile techniques (specifically scrum) and work with a combination of ASP.NET, C#, and SQL Server. My role is to oversee and accept database changes, including performance tuning and impact analysis. I also maintain our database versioning system and model database version. A lot of changes to our applications require changes to the database too. We often have to modify user-defined functions, stored procedures that are shared between applications, or even database tables directly. We've found it hard to keep up with the sheer volume of changes that came through. For customers who run locally-hosted versions of our software, we have an additional challenge: ensuring that they re running the latest version of the application and database in sync. To tackle both problems, we needed a precise database versioning system. With the help of Redgate tools, we ve created one. 3

4 The solution Michael added a number of Redgate tools to Calvi s versioning process with great success. I started by linking to Team Foundation Server, our version control system, using SQL Source Control. We re about to roll it out to our team in India. Based on my experiences here, I m absolutely certain that it ll give them a huge improvement in efficiency. SQL Compare has made a huge difference in helping us version our database it s the single most helpful tool we have. I use it to create scripts that sync changes between development and the snapshot production database. No change is missed and the development and production databases are always in sync. Developers can now use each other s changes at the start of every new sprint. I m also using my own take on continuous integration for databases. We assign a version number to each table, update that number after each sprint, and send everything over to the QA team for testing. To help out the QA team further, I create large volumes of realistic test data ahead of time, using SQL Data Generator. It s useful in my performance tuning work, too. I'm now working to get our development teams using SQL Source Control to script out their database changes for each sprint release. When I started using this system, there wasn t much information about it online from other DBAs and database developers, but I m happy to have recently seen a great blog post describing a process that s almost identical to this on Simple-Talk¹. That gives me the feeling I ve done something right. Overall, Redgate tools save me hours and hours of work each week. They ve cut out bugs and versioning accidents almost completely. In the last two years we haven t had any bugs related to database objects at all, which is a great result! ¹ 4

5 About Calvi At Calvi, we believe that every customer is entitled to a clear invoice. We are dedicated to bridging the gap between the billing systems of telecom providers and the financial needs of their business clients. Download a 14-day free trial, for everything you need to work with SQL Server: 5