Database Guardrails - new age for developers and databases

You can’t deploy blindly and let your application fail. You need to prevent the bad code from reaching production, monitor your databases, and automatically troubleshoot when something is wrong. You need database guardrails, and you need them now.

The typical test suite is not enough to capture all the issues around databases. Tests do not capture long migrations, wrong configurations, slow queries that don’t scale. Load tests may capture some of them, but are far too late and too expensive. We need a new approach to our SDLC, we need to integrate database guardrails into our process as early as possible.

In this talk we are going to see how to use OpenTelemetry to improve the whole SDLC. We’ll learn how to validate our data access queries will scale, our database will not go down during the deployment, and how to automatically root cause issues across all layers of the tech stack.

Content:
- What issues go unnoticed through the testing suite?
- How to reason about the performance and correctness of the data access layer?
- Why are load tests not enough?
- How to use OpenTelemetry to push all checks to the left?

Learning points:
- Improving SDLC with database guardrails
- Using OpenTelemetry in real world
- Getting automated observability and troubleshooting for all data access layer