The technology sector has shown itself to be very resilient last year and has enabled companies from several sectors to set up telecommuting in order to minimize the impacts of the crisis. Companies quickly familiarized themselves with other ways of working and some of them even noticed a gain in staff productivity. In the 2021 edition of its annual report on the state of adoption of DevOps in organizations, specifically by database professionals (The 2021 State of Database DevOps), Redgate Software found that adoption of DevOps has almost doubled in five years, and increased dramatically during the pandemic.

Redgate Software is a software publisher, based in Cambridge, England. It provides compliant database development solutions for the finance, healthcare, and tech industries, as well as simple and ingenious tools for SQL Server, .NET, and more. The company also operates community websites such as “SQL Server Central” and “Simple Talk”. In its report, Redgate said that throughout the past year, companies have been pressed to learn a diverse set of technologies and methods to stay agile in a changing economy.

According to the company, in this first digital world, data plays a big role; The same goes for data delivery and the persistence of the database layer itself. She believes that the application of DevOps principles and automation throughout the software lifecycle is essential to maintain a high level of efficiency. Indeed, Redgate found that 70% of businesses now use more than one database in their stack, and many organizations use a mix of on-premises and cloud-based databases.

According to Redgate, styles also diverge, as non-relational databases like NoSQL gain popularity, and new open source databases emerge to address niche situations. This means that database operators may need to put more emphasis on database development to handle additional complexity. Thus, Redgate believes that, as with application development, DevOps principles are also essential for the establishment of quality and efficient databases. Hence the importance of the Database DevOps approach.

Database DevOps is a discipline that takes into account the processes used to automate database changes and deployments. Simply put, Database DevOps helps teams identify and further streamline the application development and launch process by addressing a known bottleneck: the database. Redgate believes this is an area that is growing in people’s minds as databases become more diverse. The 2021 State of Database DevOps report surveyed 3,200 database professionals on the overall state of their DevOps adoption.

The investigation also focused on the automation and deployment of database changes and the underlying database technologies.

Source : The 2021 State of Database DevOps