PASS Chapter Meeting, March

Approaching Zero: Minimizing Downtime During Deployments

Negotiating a downtime for a release can be difficult in this modern, 24x7 world. When downtime means lost revenue, the price of taking a downtime to deploy code can run up quickly. This talk will show you a way to reduce the cost of deployment by reducing or even eliminating required downtime for database code deployment. We will show how to release new database code, update existing stored procedures, refactor and restructure tables, and even perform systemic re-architecture with no downtime and minimal blocking. We will use as a case study one release in which we modified the primary key column on 180 tables and updated over 550 stored procedures without end users noticing a thing. If you want to hit that three nines (or better) service-level agreement, this talk will help get you on the road to reduced downtime.

Kevin Feasel is a Microsoft Data Platform MVP and CTO at Envizage, where he specializes in data analytics with T-SQL and R, forcing Spark clusters to do his bidding, fighting with Kafka, and pulling rabbits out of hats on demand. He is the lead contributor to Curated SQL (https://curatedsql.com) and author of PolyBase Revealed (https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484254608). A resident of Durham, North Carolina, he can be found cycling the trails along the triangle whenever the weather's nice enough.