Redgate recently published the 2024 State of the Database Landscape report, which explores how the challenges for data professionals now encompass a lot more than managing and monitoring their database estates for high availability and optimum performance. Database DevOps, multiple database platforms, the cloud, AI, and making data available for development and testing have now also become part of the daily conversation.

Historically, Flyway has been a migrations-based database deployment tool. It greatly improves database deployments by tracking what migration scripts have been executed against a target database and applying any pending migration scripts. Since Redgate acquired Flyway in 2019, we’ve been incorporating Redgate’s database comparison technology into the paid editions (Flyway Teams/Enterprise) so that users can benefit from the best of both worlds.

This is a guest post from Mri Pandit. With the rise in the quantity and the complexity of data organizations now need to handle, the nature of the data that you store is driving the reason for your database platform of choice. Sometimes you have a mix of data, where some is relational and some is heterogeneous, which cannot be contained in a relational format.

The 2024 State of the Database Landscape survey showed that 79% of businesses are now using two or more database platforms (vs 62% in 2020). Businesses revealed that this growth was largely due to the differing use cases across each platform, as well as the need to increase flexibility. Despite these recognized benefits, increasing the diversity of your database platforms can bring its own set of challenges, including skillset requirements, data integration complexities, security, and monitoring.

The rise of the digital era has led to increasing concerns among individuals around the protection of their personal data. In 2022, for example, 24% of individuals exercised their right to Data Subject Access Requests, and this rose to 28% in 2023 according to Statista research results.

Deploying database code using pipelines in various CI/CD tools is a common practice among our customers who use Flyway. To enhance security and avoid hardcoding sensitive information like connection strings, they frequently employ variables and secrets in the pipelines.

You may have heard of test data management (TDM). It’s part of the software delivery process – some would say a crucial part, involving the creation, management, and maintenance of environments for software development and testing. By provisioning fresh, production-like data, it allows developers to test their proposed changes early, thoroughly, and repeatedly with the right test data, when they need it and where they need it.

We recently sat down with James Phillips, CIO at Rev.io, to talk about test data management (TDM) and the growing attention it’s getting from the C-suite. It’s been prompted by the recognition that provisioning test and development environments with realistic production-like data improves the quality of code being developed, reduces errors, and deliver new features to customers faster.

After many cups of coffee and takeaway pizzas, something changed in the world of SQL Prompt in November 2023. For the first time in SQL Prompt’s history, our engineering team at Redgate brought AI to its breadth of capabilities and called it Prompt+. Using generative AI-powered insights and context-based awareness, Prompt+ takes natural language queries and turns them into SQL coding suggestions.

In a world of too many acronyms and initialisms, we’re here to talk about one more – TDM, aka DevOps test data management.