How moving to a redux-like structure made things so much easier
The background
Over the last few months the Orca team at Redgate have been building a migrations-based solution for database DevOps focusing specifically on Oracle called Redgate Change Control. This has entailed building an Electron desktop application using React that communicates via some simple APIs to the Oracle comparison engine that powers the tools in our Deployment Suite for Oracle, and to Flyway.
The UI is superficially quite simple; it consists of a landing page for managing your projects and two further pages that allow users to generate database migration scripts based on changes made in a development database, and apply pending migration scripts to the database. We started from a blank page and built up the necessary functionality until within 2/3 months we had a functional product that we were able to release to EAP customers to start getting feedback on. …
At Redgate, a part of our technical strategy is to move all our products to .NET Standard as we believe this is the future for working cross-platform in the .NET stack. We are tackling this on a product-by-product basis, though with a special focus on migrating shared utilities first. To aid us, we have integrated the .NET Portability Analyzer into the build scripts of some of our products and identified some areas we can start fixing straight away.
This blog summarises our approach and some of the challenges we faced upgrading the test framework used by our Oracle DevOps tools from NUnit2 to NUnit3. …
Historically, Redgate has been primarily focused on building tools for professionals working on the SQL Server platform, but this is now starting to change. Specifically, the teams working on SQL Change Automation (SCA) are actively exploring the possibility of building out this key database DevOps capability for the Oracle platform alongside our existing Deployment Suite for Oracle.
Inevitably, this is not a straightforward process. Much of the SCA codebase, and indeed the product’s functionality, is heavily coupled to SQL Server. …
