Configuration Management of Database Assets: An Agile "Best" Practice

www.agiledata.org: Techniques for Successful Evolutionary/Agile Database Development

Sometimes a change to your system proves to be a very bad idea and you need to roll back that change to the previous state. For example, renaming the Customer.FName column to Customer.FirstName might break 50 external programs, and the cost to update those programs may prove to be too great for now. To enable database refactoring, you need to put the following items under configuration management control:

Data definition language (DDL) scripts to create the database schema
Data load/extract scripts
Data model files
Object/relational mapping meta data
Reference data
Stored procedure and trigger definitions
View definitions
Referential integrity constraints
Other database objects like sequences, indexes etc.
Test data
Test data generation scripts
Test scripts

References and Suggested Online Readings

	This book describes the philosophies and skills required for developers and database administrators to work together effectively on project teams following evolutionary software processes such as Extreme Programming (XP), the Rational Unified Process (RUP), the Agile Unified Process (AUP), Feature Driven Development (FDD), Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM), or The Enterprise Unified Process (EUP). In March 2004 it won a Jolt Productivity award.
	This book describes, in detail, how to refactor a database schema to improve its design. The first section of the book overviews the fundamentals evolutionary database techniques in general and of database refactoring in detail. More importantly it presents strategies for implementing and deploying database refactorings, in the context of both "simple" single application databases and in "complex" multi-application databases. The second section, the majority of the book, is a database refactoring reference catalog. It describes over 60 database refactorings, presenting data models overviewing each refactoring and the code to implement it.
	This book presents a full-lifecycle, agile model driven development (AMDD) approach to software development. It is one of the few books which covers both object-oriented and data-oriented development in a comprehensive and coherent manner. Techniques the book covers include Agile Modeling (AM), Full Lifecycle Object-Oriented Testing (FLOOT), over 30 modeling techniques, agile database techniques, refactoring, and test driven development (TDD). If you want to gain the skills required to build mission-critical applications in an agile manner, this is the book for you.

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