Last year was a year of unprecedented challenges for everyone in every part of the world and every industry, and it was also a year of big changes in the IT sector. The pandemic underscored the role of the IT department as an enabler and a critical part of the transition to remote working. While digitalization was well underway before 2020, no one could have predicted the acceleration the pandemic brought on.

As part of our research for the 2021 State of Database DevOps report, we asked 3,000+ recipients what they consider to be the greatest challenge when integrating database changes into a DevOps process. According to the respondents, these are the most important challenges facing database professionals when introducing DevOps practices to database development.

For good or for ill, technology is constantly shifting and with it, the roles of those who manage that technology also shift. This is no different for a DBA than it is for a developer, an admin, or analyst. As new technology, like the adoption of the cloud, changes the role, people start to question whether or not there’s even a need for a DBA. The shortest possible answer to that question, in my opinion, is “Yes”.

I work as Director at ThoughtWorks in the database and DevOps space. I’ve been here for 20+ years and I vaguely remember my first project at ThoughtWorks in 1999 when we had just started using Agile software development practices. The basic challenge we faced was how to move database changes at the same pace as application code and keep them in sync so that deployments would work. At the time, we had to invent all the tools, processes, and techniques that we needed.

At Redgate, we strongly believe that all databases should be managed and orchestrated in the same way, with the same standards of security and quality in releases. For the past few years, we’ve been leading the adoption of database DevOps by focusing on the most challenging parts of the process like version control, continuous integration and making deployments consistent, predictable and repeatable.

Mergers and acquisitions are going on all over the market at the moment … and de-mergers as well, actually. Typically in a merger or acquisition, there’s some knowledge that it’s going to happen in advance. But until the Heads of Terms have been signed and there’s a Transition Service Agreement in place, people don’t really get moving with the activity needed to support the move, particularly on the technology side.

In 2020, Deloitte reported on The four trends that define insurance and showed that the future of the insurance marketplace is going to be significantly different. Life and Property and Casualty insurers, for example, estimated that 93% of their volume already came from propositions that were not offered five years ago. New propositions were expected to keep on rising, with nearly a quarter of investment spend in insurance allocated to new product development.

My blog post from February 1 explains that Redgate took the opportunity to purchase the assets of PASS with the main goal of supporting the community. The PASS association ran for 21 years bringing together a community to connect, share, and learn. The community of course lives on, however the association no longer exists as it once did. Working with SQL Server and the data platform is what unites us all. Data is at the heart of everything we do.

As the manager for enterprise applications and data at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, I face a lot of unique challenges. The university itself has around 25,000 students, 1,000 permanent staff and another 1,000 seasonal staff who assist with key academic sessions. They’re spread out across the flagship campus at Sippy Downs and a number of satellite campuses and research and teaching facilities in other locations.