erics44 (7/31/2012)
Grant Fritchey (7/31/2012)
Just a question, changes are getting made to the production server directly and then you need those brought down to dev and we're not talking data?I'd say the process is backwards. You should always be deploying upwards. If you put your database into source control and manage it the same way you do app code, you should be able to rebuild a dev environment at any given moment (minus the data). At least, that's how I helped manage about 15 different development teams.
🙂 99.99999 % of the time yes, at the minute we are just going live with a big project that is massively overdue and its like final tweaks, although the final tweaks have been dragging a bit, (in fact even in this instamce it should really be that way, its just come to boiling point where its got to be done yesterday and all resource is on it)
the process will change to a dev, staging, live situations as soon as the system is live
Oh, a death march. Those always turn out well...
I've been in this situation before. I've won the fight and I've lost the fight. The fight is, despite the fact we're in a death march, still do things properly. The places where I won the fight, we knew what we were deploying. The places where I've lost the fight, we spent almost as much time troubleshooting why new stuff kept breaking as we did fixing the stuff that was already broken.
If you're stuck in that situation, I'm sorry. If you don't have a comparison tool to be able to see what has changed between two different databases, I'd suggest getting one. The better examples of this type of tool can be easily automated so that you capture all the changes on the fly. My personal favorite, SQL Compare [/url]from Red Gate (my employer), but there are others out there (almost as good) that will get the job done. That's what I'd suggest to try to keep this in some type of control.
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