Getting Your DBA Teams Scripts into Git | Hacker News Reader

Getting Your DBA Teams Scripts into Git

sqlservercentral.com

24 pointsxlinux32 comments

Call me ignorant but I am surprised that there are people in the engineering realm that still don't use a VCS for everything.

In the world I work in, which is lots of DBAs/sysadmins/db developers, lots don't do anything with VCS when working in databases.

To be fair, lots of developers who make/need database changes still email those to DBAs/sysadmins.

I've gotten surprised gasps for the use of etckeeper.

"you can actually do that?" "why didn't anyone tell me?" etc.

To some, VCS is still a novel invention.

A bit surprised to see there is no mention of Liquibase, Flyway or others. Not to mention there is also "https://www.dolthub.com/". This was just for git.

I work for the company that owns/developers Flyway, so I didn't include it in here.

However, for DBAs, they often are doing ad hoc stuff and there is a bit of overhead for FW/LB that they may not want. This is part of a series, just getting people comfortable with tracking their work.

Thanks for the explanation. And no worries. I was only mildly surprised it was on one direction. Now I know why.

There is also Bytebase[1].

[1] https://github.com/bytebase/bytebase

Did not know about this. Seems awesome tool to work for next project. Thanks.

going off of "devops are sysadmin that push their scripts to git" I think we can now call DBAs DbOps. I pronounce it like "deebops".

I thought they were called Data Engineers nowadays

Nah, data engineers tend to specialize in moving data from point A to point B. DBAs tend to specialize in managing data in point A or point B.

Some people cultivate aspects of both skillsets of course and data engineers often end up doing DBA functions in point B (where analytical data is stored) while DBAs manage point A (OLTP source systems)

Data Engineers are DBAs who are trying to hide that fact as much as possible so they have time to learn kafka on the job.

Well done for knowledge sharing.

I always impresses me, how many don't understand how to manage their SQL scripts, packages and stored procedures in SCM systems, when this was already a common product from SQL vendors in the 1990's.

Thank you (it's my piece)

I'll send it to a DBA colleague that is truly struggling with this XD

Neat! Very intersting

I've never seen so many screenshots for a git tutorial. Are windows users ok?

Generally the word DBA has a pretty broad meaning - and one of them is that you were a click admin that got hoisted into being responsible for your database servers, and things like software engineering tools (git, shell scripting in general) are a few years off.

The number of databases I have seen out of source control is too many to count, the number of times I had people who understood SQL very well but couldn't use git worth a damn. Some of them have been modifying the top of the file of a stored procedure for decades

  2024-01-01 hobs - changed even more shit
  2023-07-24 hobs - minor tweaks
  2001-02-04 hobs - created

I am reasonably confident that Oracle keeps its code under source control, but the PL/SQL packages it supplied start with a lot of this. The package WWV_FLOW, central to the APEX/ORDS product has more than 500 lines like

  --    MODIFIED   (MM/DD/YYYY)
  --      mhichwa   08/04/1999 - Created
  --      mhichwa   09/30/1999 - Removed g_show_reset global
  --      mhichwa   10/09/1999 - Added g_last_query_text global for error reporting
  --      mhichwa   10/09/1999 - Removed g_success_procedure, g_success_url
  --      mhichwa   10/09/1999 - Removed g_step_sub_title_font_color   --
  --      mhichwa   10/14/1999 - Added 10 extra inputs v26 ... v35

Thanks for the good laugh, but yeah, the time before source control is not that far behind some of us.

Have you ever seen a book about a Windows app? 1200 pages, 1000 of them screenshots.

An insane way to do computing.

its how we roll in Windows land, GUIs over command line mostly

true, you need some screenshots to teach someone a new trick

but then when they've done it once they'll remember it because GUIs really help for that kind of stuff

whereas for command line you'll have to google it every single time for the rest of your life unless its something you do regularly

Until the UI changes and a button moves or is renamed.

...Or just commit the terminal commands and/or resulting dotfiles to git.

Which the GUI paradigm has no built in equivalent to

Equivalent GUI paradigm : macro recording?

Not really, at least not in Windows. There are no cross-application macros in Windows, just intra-application ones, and that only for some applications.

It is a little better on MacOS with AppleScript, which can be used to bind different applications together. But not all of them, and it is far from ideal.

In the end, nothing of this is command-line equivalent.

Btw, if you want to see a GUI application that can do really really good macros, learn Blender! E.g. you can bind any button and knob to keyframes to change them in animations. That would be the level of macro-integration required to be CLI-like...

I rather roll with Xerox, Dec, Apple and ETHZ way of computing with OLE Automation, COM, WMI, .NET, VBScript and PowerShell REPLs and scripts.

there's AutoHotKey on windows, among a ton of other automation tools.

It's a very old way to use git, too. There's a CLI client for windows which doesn't require the old git bash program or mingw. You can install it via widget, scoop, or chocolatey and run it in windows terminal

It's that lots of db people don't understand anything about VCS period. They don't use them. (it's my piece)

letting Git, get you down?

Mental Models I Rely On To Beat Git: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm2x7xWQID4&t=7s

note: this is my video

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