Database Development – The Secret Behind the Rising ‘DevOps Adoption’

The last three years has watched DevOps significantly grow into a successful and reliable technology. This is due to several factors including increased speed-to-market, reduced error in the process-chain and bringing innovation to the table.

However, collaboration has been the heart of this process and taking ahead this very legacy is database development, in alignment with application development. According to a recent study, DevOps adoption is seeing both an upward and diagonal growth (internally in the organization).

The report observes that this trend is facilitating the unification of ‘application and database development’, making a positive impact on compliance with data privacy regulations and of course driving business benefits.

Following are the findings of the report conducted after surveying over 1000 organizations:

85 percent of the organizations surveyed have already adopted DevOps or have plans to do so in the coming two years, increasing the DevOps adoption rate by 3 percent from 82 percent last year.

Database DevOps– The Point of Focus

• Standard DevOps practices including automated provisioning, continuous integration, and version control are being rolled out across both application and database teams, accelerating development and obstructing the database from becoming a DevOps bottleneck. 57 percent of the surveyed firms have already implemented DevOps across some or all of their projects, up from 20 percent reported by the first version of the State of Database DevOps Survey 2017 study.

• As per the 2018 Accelerate State of DevOps report, which monitored DevOps progress over the last three years, ‘database deployment’ was for the first time, pointed as the key to DevOps high performance. Out of the total leading organizations in the Redgate survey, 23 percent pointed that traditional database practices increased the risk of failed deployments while 20 percent identified slow development and release cycles as major issues with non-DevOps approaches.

• Displaying an increased desire for change, 52 percent of the surveyed organizations confidently say that they can move to fully-automated database DevOps within a period of one year. This depicts the growth of 83 percent for those who have already adopted DevOps across all other projects

However, there remains a significant percentage of organizations who have failed to go ahead with DevOps.

DevOps Adoption— Still a question

• Out of the total organizations surveyed, 15 percent said that they have no plans to introduce DevOps into their work processes in the next two years, while 40 percent cited lack of awareness as the main challenge to adoption.  For those who have already started their DevOps journey, their main challenge is ‘disruption to the workflow’. It was observed that all respondents identified lack of skills (22 percent) and disruption to business (21 percent) as the biggest obstacles to success in the process.

• The need to meet increasingly strict compliance requirements has also triggered database DevOps. 61 percent of the organizations think that it has a positive impact on meeting regulatory requirements, increasing the number of organizations in favor of DevOps to 66 percent among those who already adopted it. It is disappointing for such organizations because for those who have adopted DevOps are reaping the benefit of introducing common practices across both application and database development.

• Version control is used by 83 percent of respondents working on application development and 55 percent on database development, up from 81 percent and 53 percent in 2018. And the use of continuous integration in development has increased even more, from 40 percent (application) and 21 percent (database) to 53 percent and 27 percent. This is leading to increased usage of third-party tools across DevOps processes.

• Closer collaboration between developers and DBAs is essential to successful DevOps, and the survey found that traditional barriers are continuing to break down. 62% of respondents said that collaboration between DBAs and developers was ‘Great’ or ‘Good’, rising to 76% amongst those that have adopted DevOps across all projects.

77% of organizations have developers responsible for both database and application development, although this varies by industry and company size, with larger businesses and those in financial services, healthcare and government more likely to have dedicated database developers.

[READ MORE: DevOps ROI: How to Measure the Success of DevOps]

The 2019 State of Database DevOps Survey was conducted on over 1,000 IT professionals from around the world who stand witness to an increased DevOps adoption trend with standard practices being implemented in both application and database development.

While there are many already driving DevOps business benefits out there, are you one of them?