“But I can hardly sit still. I keep fidgeting, crossing one leg and then the other. I feel like I could throw off sparks, or break a window–maybe rearrange all the furniture.”
– Raymond Carver

I understand that starting off a blog about Azure SQL Database with the above quote is a little weird, but honestly I’m _really_ excited about what I’m about to tell you.

***Note before starting: This blog post assumes you’re familiar with the concepts of Database Source Control, CI and CD, Azure SQL Database and pipelines within Azure DevOps, otherwise here be dragons.***

I am a huge fan of SQL Change Automation – mostly because of the migrations functionality. In my mind it represents an ideal workflow for making complex SQL Server database changes. If you’re not sure about the different models (State, Migrations, Hybrid), take a look at my blog post from last week here! But until this time it has had one thing that I could not easily do with it… Platform as a Service, Azure SQL DB.

Now don’t get me wrong, SQL Change Automation could easily deploy to Azure SQL Database but I had a problem. The words:

“Chris how do we benefit from the migrations approach and put the shadow database and build db in Azure SQL too? We don’t have any local instances or VMs we can use for this and Dev, Test and Prod are all in PaaS!”

elicited this response:

But. No. Longer.

Now for those of you who don’t know, the _SHADOW_ database that SQL Change Automation creates is effectively a schema and static data only copy of your database, and it is dropped and built each time you verify, to ensure that all of the migrations run successfully and you can effectively check your work and shift the build left (!!), before you even check into source control.

This shadow database and the build database shared one thing in common and that was that you couldn’t build them in Azure SQL DB, which left 2 choices:

• Use an instance of SQL Server. Developer for the shadow locally maybe; a VM in Azure or on-prem hosted instance for building
• [For build specifically] Use localDB. Not advisable if your database contains any objects not supported by localDB because (juuuust in case you didn’t know) it is SQL Server Express.

But on May 12th 2020 (and I only found out about this like 2 weeks ago) the SQL Change Automation team at Redgate released version 4.2.20133 of the plugin for SSMS which included a few super cool things like additional Azure SQL support and the Custom Provisioning Scripts feature.*

Now this is great because not only can we now easily create SQL Clones to be used as the development source (and I’ll blog about THAT a little later) but of course you can use it to use an Azure SQL DB for the shadow AND to use a persistent Azure SQL DB for the CI build as well!

Now unfortunately Kendra kinda beat me to the punch here and she produced a fabulous 3 part video series you can watch on using SQL Change Automation solely with Azure SQL DB, and you can view those here if you don’t want to see me try it out:

• Source Control: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-BFWzRTCBI&feature=youtu.be
• (CI) Build: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1P-gKSHXxw&feature=youtu.be
• (CD) Release: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUHC2fwp3bs&feature=youtu.be

Getting set up

The first thing I did was make sure that I had all of the necessary environments to try this out – I created 3 Azure SQL Databases to mimic Development, Build and Production environments on 2 separate Prod and Non Prod Azure SQL Servers. I ran the DMDatabase prep scripts (you can find these here) to setup Dev_Chris and Production, but left BuildDB empty.

Next It was time to create my project, so I hopped over into Azure DevOps and created a new project, initialized it with a README and then Cloned it down onto my local environment:

Everything was ready to go so it was time to create my project!

Setting up SQL Change Automation in SSMS

*cough* or if you’re me, update it first because you’re on a REALLY old version *cough*

Then I hit “Create a New Project” and it allowed me to just specify the connection string to the Dev Azure SQL DB and the project location was the checked-out local repo:

Didn’t change any of the options because I’m a rebel and I didn’t feel like filtering anything out! But of course now comes the fun bit… the baseline. I chose my production Azure SQL DB as it’s my only upstream DB at this point, and it’s time to hit “Create Project”.

…and Huzzah! It’s worked and we’re all good!

Now… that’s actually not the best bit! The reason why Andrew there is clapping so hard? Well that little piece of magic has happened in the background! A Shadow database has actually been created for me against my azure server automatically! This is done by using the connection string that is used for dev!

Now… one thing to check, and I didn’t think to do this, but you can specify the connection string in the SQL Change Automation user file but I just left mine for a bit not realizing it created an Azure SQL DB for the Shadow that was CONSIDERABLY higher tier than my dev environment (bye bye Azure credit!), but fortunately I was able to scale it down quickly to basic and that has stuck, but be warned!

So I did what all ‘good devs’ would do now… I committed and pushed my initial commit directly to my main branch! (Don’t tell my boss!)

and safely sat my Database in Azure DevOps:

Setting up the build and deployment stages

This bit was actually just as easy. I used to hate YAML but thanks to a certain (wonderful) Alex Yates I jumped in anyway and it turned out to be just fine!

I created a new basic YAML file within Azure DevOps (and used the assistant to just auto populate the Redgate defaults, if you don’t know YAML or what it can do already, there’s a really good MS article here) and committed it to the main branch again (whoopsie) and the only component was the SQL Change Automation plugin I pulled in from the Azure DevOps marketplace, and I configured the build to target my “nonprod” server and the Build DB I had created previously.

On saving and running the pipeline succeeded!

All that was left to do was to create a Release Pipeline. So naturally, I jumped straight in and created a new pipeline, and I started with an empty job and called it Production – *note* make sure you also choose your Build artifact before configuring your release stage too by clicking the Add an Artifact option!:

I added the SQL Change Automation: Release step to the agent job (note because this is all hosted, I’m using an Azure DevOps hosted agent to do this step):

Now you’ll need to add 2 stages (both the SQL Change Automation: Release plugin) at this point, a “Create Release” and a “Deploy from Database Release Artifact” because one will look at the target and figure everything out for you, and you’ll be able to review exactly what will be deployed, and the other will actually _do_ the deployment:

From here you just have to specify the options available, like in this wonderful walk-through here from the fabulous Chris Kerswell of DBAle fame! For me, this was simply targeting my Production Azure SQL Database.

You’ll definitely want to use the project variables to pick up the right package, and also leave the export path blank in both steps for now:

You can Clone the step by right clicking instead if you want to which will preserve all the connections you’ve already provided! Then once it’s all pointed at the right place, save and queue the release!

And of course, we were successful:

and then finally with a couple of triggers set to automatically build and deploy I made a change to my Contacts table in my Azure SQL Dev DB and a few minutes later, thanks to Azure DevOps and Redgate SQL Change Automation the very same change appeared in Production, with no reliance on anything other than Azure SQL DB and SQL Change Automation:

Conclusion

If you have all of your databases in Azure SQL Database**, fear not because SQL Change Automation to the rescue! You can very easily set up and configure a pipeline in Azure DevOps or indeed any pipeline of your choice, but it’s never been easier to persist development changes all the way through to Production in a low risk, incremental, “DevOps” way!

—NOTES—

*An important word from the release notes: Note that it is still generally recommended to locate the shadow database locally where possible as that will usually result in a faster database connection. The default CreateDatabase.sql and DropDatabase.sql scripts can be altered to improve performance or implement custom provisioning logic.

**If you have all of your Databases in Azure and you need them masked for Dev/Test too, check out this previous blog post in which I outlined how to do that using Azure DevOps too!