I’m really excited about speaking at SQL Saturday on my favorite topic!
SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics. I’m all for that!
At this event, I’ll be discussing Accelerating DevOps and TDM Using Data Virtualization. This is my favorite topic, because for the 20 years that I worked as a DBA, I ran into the same roadblock time and again. The roadblock of data volume.
“DevOps” is a conflation of parts of the words “development” and “operations”, and it represents the grass-roots movement to merge application development, application testing, and IT operations into one continuous stream. All tasks from coding to testing to operations must be automated so that new features and fixes can be delivered on a continual flow.
“TDM” is Test Data Management, the optimization of software quality testing to ensure that applications are built and maintained to operate according to their specifications.
Constraining both these goals is data volume, which is growing beyond the capability of most enterprises. “Storage is cheap” is not merely a cheap lie to dismiss the problem without solving it, but it is irrelevant and beside the point.
The real issue is time, because it takes a lot of time to push terabytes around from place to place; it is just physics. It is time which is most expensive and, by the way, storage really isn’t cheap, especially not in the quality that is demanded, and certainly not in the quantities in which it is being demanded.
Provisioning a full environment for each developer or tester, one for each task, of each project, seems unrealistic when each environment might require terabytes of storage. As a result, developers and testers are limited to working in shared DEV or TEST environments which are refreshed only every few months, if ever. Code quality suffers, testing suffers, and the pace of delivery fails to live up to business needs.
Server virtualization unleashed a surge of productivity in IT infrastructure over the past ten years. But each virtual server still requires actual storage, making storage and data the constraint which holds everything back.
Data virtualization is the solution.
Come learn how to accelerate development, how to accelerate testing, and how to accelerate the pace of innovation.
Come learn how to inspire more “a-ha!” moments by eliminating the constraint of data under which the software development lifecycle has labored over the past decades.