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  • PHP remote development workflow: git, symfony and hudson

    - by user2022
    I'm looking to develop a website and all the work will be done remotely (no local dev server). The reason for this is that my shared hosting company a2hosting has a specific configuration (symfony,mysql,git) that I don't want to spend time duplicating when I can just ssh and develop remotely or through netbeans remote editing features. My question is how can I use git to separate my site into three areas: live, staging and dev. Here's my initial thought: public_html (live site and git repo) testing: a mirror of the site used for visual tests (full git repo) dev/ticket# : git branches of public_html used for features and bug fixes (full git repo) Version Control with git: Initial setup: cd public_html git init git add * git commit -m ‘initial commit of the site’ cd .. git clone public_html testing mkdir dev Development: cd /dev git clone ../testing ticket# all work is done in ./dev/ticket#, then visit www.domain.com/dev/ticket# to visually test make granular commits as necessary until dev is done git push origin master:ticket# if the above fails: merge latest testing state into current dev work: git merge origin/master then try the push again mark ticket# as ready for integration integration and deployment process: cd ../../testing git merge ticket# -m "integration test for ticket# --no-ff (check for conflicts ) run hudson tests visit www.domain.com/testing for visual test if all tests pass: if this ticket marks the end of a big dev sprint: make a snapshot with git tag git push --tags origin else git push origin cd ../public_html git checkout -f (live site should have the latest dev from ticket#) else: revert the merge: git checkout master~1; git commit -m "reverting ticket#" update ticket# that testing failed with the failure details Snapshots: Each major deployment sprint should have a standard name and should be tracked. Method: git tag Naming convention: TBD Reverting site to previous state If something goes wrong, then revert to previous snapshot and debug the issue in dev with a new ticket#. Once the bug is fixed, follow the deployment process again. My questions: Does this workflow make sense, if not, any recommendations Is my approach for reverting correct or is there a better way to say 'revert to before x commit'

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  • Looking for an example of how a software project can be managed/deployed

    - by rguilbault
    My company is evaluating adopting off-the-shelf ALM products to aid in our development lifecycle; we currently use our own homegrown solutions to manage requirements gathering, specification documentation, testing, etc. One of the issues I am having is understanding how to move code between stages of development. We have what we call a pipeline, which consists of particular stops: [Source] - [QC] - [Production] At the first stop, the developer works out a solution to some requested change and performs individual testing. When that process is complete (and peer review has been performed), our ALM system physically moves the affected programs from the [Source] runtime environment to the [QC] runtime environment. This movement of code is triggered by advancing the status of the change request to match the stage of the pipeline. I have been searching the internet for a few days trying to find how the process is accomplished elsewhere -- I have read a bit about builds, automated testing, various ALM products, etc. but nowhere does any of this state how builds interact with initial change requests, what the triggers are, how dependencies are managed, how the various forms of testing are accommodated (e.g. unit testing, integration testing, regression testing), etc. Can anyone point me to any resources detailing specific workflows or attempt to explain (generically) how a change could/should be tracked and moved though the development lifecycle? I'd be very appreciative. Note: I've cleaned up the question to hopefully make it easier to understand. Also, I found another question (which I can't find now) that referenced this book, which sounds like it might be exactly what I am looking for -- not sure if I want to shell out the cash for it, though.

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  • How do I send automated e-mails from Drupal using Messaging and Notifications?

    - by Adrian
    I am working on a Notifications plugin, and after starting to write my notes down about how to do this, decided to just post them here. Please feel free to come make modifications and changes. Eventually I hope to post this on the Drupal handbook as well. Thanks. --Adrian Sending automated e-mails from Drupal using Messaging and Notifications To implement a notifications plugin, you must implement the following functions: Use hook_messaging, hook_token_list and hook_token_values to create the messages that will be sent. Use hook_notifications to create the subscription types Add code to fire events (eg in hook_nodeapi) Add all UI elements to allow users to subscribe/unsubscribe Understanding Messaging The Messaging module is used to compose messages that can be delivered using various formats, such as simple mail, HTML mail, Twitter updates, etc. These formats are called "send methods." The backend details do not concern us here; what is important are the following concepts: TOKENS: tokens are provided by the "tokens" module. They allow you to write keywords in square brackets, [like-this], that can be replaced by any arbitrary value. Note: the token groups you create must match the keys you add to the $events-objects[$key] array. MESSAGE KEYS: A key is a part of a message, such as the greetings line. Keys can be different for each send method. For example, a plaintext mail's greeting might be "Hi, [user]," while an HTML greeing might be "Hi, [user]," and Twitter's might just be "[user-firstname]: ". Keys can have any arbitrary name. Keys are very simple and only have a machine-readable name and a user-readable description, the latter of which is only seen by admins. MESSAGE GROUPS: A group is a bunch of keys that often, but not always, might be used together to make up a complete message. For example, a generic group might include keys for a greeting, body, closing and footer. Groups can also be "subclassed" by selecting a "fallback" group that will supply any keys that are missing. Groups are also associated with modules; I'm not sure what these are used for. Understanding Notifications The Notifications module revolves around the following concepts: SUBSCRIPTIONS: Notifications plugins may define one or more types of subscriptions. For example, notifications_content defines subscriptions for: Threads (users are notified whenever a node or its comments change) Content types (users are notified whenever a node of a certain type is created or is changed) Users (users are notified whenever another user is changed) Subscriptions refer to both the user who's subscribed, how often they wish to be notified, the send method (for Messaging) and what's being subscribed to. This last part is defined in two steps. Firstly, a plugin defines several "subscription fields" (through a hook_notifications op of the same name), and secondly, "subscription types" (also an op) defines which fields apply to each type of subscription. For example, notifications_content defines the fields "nid," "author" and "type," and the subscriptions "thread" (nid), "nodetype" (type), "author" (author) and "typeauthor" (type and author), the latter referring to something like "any STORY by JOE." Fields are used to link events to subscriptions; an event must match all fields of a subscription (for all normal subscriptions) to be delivered to the recipient. The $subscriptions object is defined in subsequent sections. Notifications prefers that you don't create these objects yourself, preferring you to call the notifications_get_link() function to create a link that users may click on, but you can also use notifications_save_subscription and notifications_delete_subscription to do it yourself. EVENTS: An event is something that users may be notified about. Plugins create the $event object then call notifications_event($event). This either sends out notifications immediately, queues them to send out later, or both. Events include the type of thing that's changed (eg 'node', 'user'), the ID of the thing that's changed (eg $node-nid, $user-uid) and what's happened to it (eg 'create'). These are, respectively, $event-type, $event-oid (object ID) and $event-action. Warning: notifications_content_nodeapi also adds a $event-node field, referring to the node itself and not just $event-oid = $node-nid. This is not used anywhere in the core notifications module; however, when the $event is passed back to the 'query' op (see below), we assume the node is still present. Events do not refer to the user they will be referred to; instead, Notifications makes the connection between subscriptions and events, using the subscriptions' fields. MATCHING EVENTS TO SUBSCRIPTIONS: An event matches a subscription if it has the same type as the event (eg "node") and if the event matches all the correct fields. This second step is determined by the "query" hook op, which is called with the $event object as a parameter. The query op is responsible for giving Notifications a value for all the fields defined by the plugin. For example, notifications_content defines the 'nid', 'type' and 'author' fields, so its query op looks like this (ignore the case where $event_or_user = 'user' for now): $event_or_user = $arg0; $event_type = $arg1; $event_or_object = $arg2; if ($event_or_user == 'event' && $event_type == 'node' && ($node = $event_or_object->node) || $event_or_user == 'user' && $event_type == 'node' && ($node = $event_or_object)) { $query[]['fields'] = array( 'nid' => $node->nid, 'type' => $node->type, 'author' => $node->uid, ); return $query; After extracting the $node from the $event, we set $query[]['fields'] to a dictionary defining, for this event, all the fields defined by the module. As you can tell from the presence of the $query object, there's way more you can do with this op, but they are not covered here. DIGESTING AND DEDUPING: Understanding the relationship between Messaging and Notifications Usually, the name of a message group doesn't matter, but when being used with Notifications, the names must follow very strict patterns. Firstly, they must start with the name "notifications," and then are followed by either "event" or "digest," depending on whether the message group is being used to represent either a single event or a group of events. For 'events,' the third part of the name is the "type," which we get from Notification's $event-type (eg: notifications_content uses 'node'). The last part of the name is the operation being performed, which comes from Notification's $event-action. For example: notifications-event-node-comment might refer to the message group used when someone comments on a node notifications-event-user-update to a user who's updated their profile Hyphens cannot appear anywhere other than to separate the parts of these words. For 'digest' messages, the third and fourth part of the name come from hook_notification's "event types" callback, specifically this line: $types[] = array( 'type' => 'node', 'action' => 'insert', ... 'digest' => array('node', 'type'), ); $types[] = array( 'type' => 'node', 'action' => 'update', ... 'digest' => array('node', 'nid'), ); In this case, the first event type (node insertion) will be digested with the notifications-digest-node-type message template providing the header and footer, likely saying something like "the following [type] was created." The second event type (node update) will be digested with the notifications-digest-node-nid message template. Data Structure and Callback Reference $event The $event object has the following members: $event-type: The type of event. Must match the type in hook_notification::"event types". {notifications_event} $event-action: The action the event describes. Most events are sorted by [$event-type][$event-action]. {notifications_event}. $event-object[$object_type]: All objects relevant to the event. For example, $event-object['node'] might be the node that the event describes. $object_type can come from the 'event types' hook (see below). The main purpose appears to be to be passed to token_replace_multiple as the second parameter. $event-object[$event-type] is assumed to exist in the short digest processing functions, but this doesn't appear to be used anywhere. Not saved in the database; loaded by hook_notifications::"event load" $event-oid: apparently unused. The id of the primary object relevant to this event (eg the node's nid). $event-module: apparently unused $event-params[$key]: Mainly a place for plugins to save random data. The main module will serialize the contents of this array but does not use it in any way. However, notifications_ui appears to do something weird with it, possibly by using subscriptions' fields as keys into this array. I'm not sure why though. hook_notifications op 'subscription types': returns an array of subscription types provided by the plugin, in the form $key = array(...) with the following members: event_type: this subscription can only match events whose $event-type has this value. Stored in the database as notifications.event_type for every individual subscription. Apparently, this can be overiden in code but I wouldn't try it (see notifications_save_subscription). fields: an unkeyed array of fields that must be matched by an event (in addition to the event_type) for it to match this subscription. Each element of this array must be a key of the array returned by op 'subscription fields' which in turn must be used by op 'query' to actually perform the matching. title: user-readable title for their subscriptions page (eg the 'type' column in user/%uid/notifications/subscriptions) description: a user-readable description. page callback: used to add a supplementary page at user/%uid/notifications/blah. This and the following are used by notifications_ui as a part of hook_menu_alter. Appears to be partially deprecated. user page: user/%uid/notifications/blah. op 'event types': returns an array of event types, with each event type being an array with the following members: type: this will match $event-type action: this will match $event-action digest: an array with two ordered (non-keyed) elements, "type" and "field." 'type' is used as an index into $event-objects. 'field' is also used to group events like so: $event-objects[$type]-$field. For example, 'field' might be 'nid' - if the object is a node, the digest lines will be grouped by node ID. Finally, both are used to find the correct Messaging template; see discussion above. description: used on the admin "Notifications-Events" page name: unused, use Messaging instead line: deprecated, use Messaging instead Other Stuff This is an example of the main query that inserts an event into the queue: INSERT INTO {notifications_queue} (uid, destination, sid, module, eid, send_interval, send_method, cron, created, conditions) SELECT DISTINCT s.uid, s.destination, s.sid, s.module, %d, // event ID s.send_interval, s.send_method, s.cron, %d, // time of the event s.conditions FROM {notifications} s INNER JOIN {notifications_fields} f ON s.sid = f.sid WHERE (s.status = 1) AND (s.event_type = '%s') // subscription type AND (s.send_interval >= 0) AND (s.uid <> %d) AND ( (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval IN (%d)) // everything from 'query' op OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval = %d) OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.value = '%s') OR (f.field = '%s' AND f.intval = %d)) GROUP BY s.uid, s.destination, s.sid, s.module, s.send_interval, s.send_method, s.cron, s.conditions HAVING s.conditions = count(f.sid)

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  • Towards Database Continuous Delivery – What Next after Continuous Integration? A Checklist

    - by Ben Rees
    .dbd-banner p{ font-size:0.75em; padding:0 0 10px; margin:0 } .dbd-banner p span{ color:#675C6D; } .dbd-banner p:last-child{ padding:0; } @media ALL and (max-width:640px){ .dbd-banner{ background:#f0f0f0; padding:5px; color:#333; margin-top: 5px; } } -- Database delivery patterns & practices STAGE 4 AUTOMATED DEPLOYMENT If you’ve been fortunate enough to get to the stage where you’ve implemented some sort of continuous integration process for your database updates, then hopefully you’re seeing the benefits of that investment – constant feedback on changes your devs are making, advanced warning of data loss (prior to the production release on Saturday night!), a nice suite of automated tests to check business logic, so you know it’s going to work when it goes live, and so on. But what next? What can you do to improve your delivery process further, moving towards a full continuous delivery process for your database? In this article I describe some of the issues you might need to tackle on the next stage of this journey, and how to plan to overcome those obstacles before they appear. Our Database Delivery Learning Program consists of four stages, really three – source controlling a database, running continuous integration processes, then how to set up automated deployment (the middle stage is split in two – basic and advanced continuous integration, making four stages in total). If you’ve managed to work through the first three of these stages – source control, basic, then advanced CI, then you should have a solid change management process set up where, every time one of your team checks in a change to your database (whether schema or static reference data), this change gets fully tested automatically by your CI server. But this is only part of the story. Great, we know that our updates work, that the upgrade process works, that the upgrade isn’t going to wipe our 4Tb of production data with a single DROP TABLE. But – how do you get this (fully tested) release live? Continuous delivery means being always ready to release your software at any point in time. There’s a significant gap between your latest version being tested, and it being easily releasable. Just a quick note on terminology – there’s a nice piece here from Atlassian on the difference between continuous integration, continuous delivery and continuous deployment. This piece also gives a nice description of the benefits of continuous delivery. These benefits have been summed up by Jez Humble at Thoughtworks as: “Continuous delivery is a set of principles and practices to reduce the cost, time, and risk of delivering incremental changes to users” There’s another really useful piece here on Simple-Talk about the need for continuous delivery and how it applies to the database written by Phil Factor – specifically the extra needs and complexities of implementing a full CD solution for the database (compared to just implementing CD for, say, a web app). So, hopefully you’re convinced of moving on the the next stage! The next step after CI is to get some sort of automated deployment (or “release management”) process set up. But what should I do next? What do I need to plan and think about for getting my automated database deployment process set up? Can’t I just install one of the many release management tools available and hey presto, I’m ready! If only it were that simple. Below I list some of the areas that it’s worth spending a little time on, where a little planning and prep could go a long way. It’s also worth pointing out, that this should really be an evolving process. Depending on your starting point of course, it can be a long journey from your current setup to a full continuous delivery pipeline. If you’ve got a CI mechanism in place, you’re certainly a long way down that path. Nevertheless, we’d recommend evolving your process incrementally. Pages 157 and 129-141 of the book on Continuous Delivery (by Jez Humble and Dave Farley) have some great guidance on building up a pipeline incrementally: http://www.amazon.com/Continuous-Delivery-Deployment-Automation-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321601912 For now, in this post, we’ll look at the following areas for your checklist: You and Your Team Environments The Deployment Process Rollback and Recovery Development Practices You and Your Team It’s a cliché in the DevOps community that “It’s not all about processes and tools, really it’s all about a culture”. As stated in this DevOps report from Puppet Labs: “DevOps processes and tooling contribute to high performance, but these practices alone aren’t enough to achieve organizational success. The most common barriers to DevOps adoption are cultural: lack of manager or team buy-in, or the value of DevOps isn’t understood outside of a specific group”. Like most clichés, there’s truth in there – if you want to set up a database continuous delivery process, you need to get your boss, your department, your company (if relevant) onside. Why? Because it’s an investment with the benefits coming way down the line. But the benefits are huge – for HP, in the book A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware, these are summarized as: -2008 to present: overall development costs reduced by 40% -Number of programs under development increased by 140% -Development costs per program down 78% -Firmware resources now driving innovation increased by a factor of 8 (from 5% working on new features to 40% But what does this mean? It means that, when moving to the next stage, to make that extra investment in automating your deployment process, it helps a lot if everyone is convinced that this is a good thing. That they understand the benefits of automated deployment and are willing to make the effort to transform to a new way of working. Incidentally, if you’re ever struggling to convince someone of the value I’d strongly recommend just buying them a copy of this book – a great read, and a very practical guide to how it can really work at a large org. I’ve spoken to many customers who have implemented database CI who describe their deployment process as “The point where automation breaks down. Up to that point, the CI process runs, untouched by human hand, but as soon as that’s finished we revert to manual.” This deployment process can involve, for example, a DBA manually comparing an environment (say, QA) to production, creating the upgrade scripts, reading through them, checking them against an Excel document emailed to him/her the night before, turning to page 29 in his/her notebook to double-check how replication is switched off and on for deployments, and so on and so on. Painful, error-prone and lengthy. But the point is, if this is something like your deployment process, telling your DBA “We’re changing everything you do and your toolset next week, to automate most of your role – that’s okay isn’t it?” isn’t likely to go down well. There’s some work here to bring him/her onside – to explain what you’re doing, why there will still be control of the deployment process and so on. Or of course, if you’re the DBA looking after this process, you have to do a similar job in reverse. You may have researched and worked out how you’d like to change your methodology to start automating your painful release process, but do the dev team know this? What if they have to start producing different artifacts for you? Will they be happy with this? Worth talking to them, to find out. As well as talking to your DBA/dev team, the other group to get involved before implementation is your manager. And possibly your manager’s manager too. As mentioned, unless there’s buy-in “from the top”, you’re going to hit problems when the implementation starts to get rocky (and what tool/process implementations don’t get rocky?!). You need to have support from someone senior in your organisation – someone you can turn to when you need help with a delayed implementation, lack of resources or lack of progress. Actions: Get your DBA involved (or whoever looks after live deployments) and discuss what you’re planning to do or, if you’re the DBA yourself, get the dev team up-to-speed with your plans, Get your boss involved too and make sure he/she is bought in to the investment. Environments Where are you going to deploy to? And really this question is – what environments do you want set up for your deployment pipeline? Assume everyone has “Production”, but do you have a QA environment? Dedicated development environments for each dev? Proper pre-production? I’ve seen every setup under the sun, and there is often a big difference between “What we want, to do continuous delivery properly” and “What we’re currently stuck with”. Some of these differences are: What we want What we’ve got Each developer with their own dedicated database environment A single shared “development” environment, used by everyone at once An Integration box used to test the integration of all check-ins via the CI process, along with a full suite of unit-tests running on that machine In fact if you have a CI process running, you’re likely to have some sort of integration server running (even if you don’t call it that!). Whether you have a full suite of unit tests running is a different question… Separate QA environment used explicitly for manual testing prior to release “We just test on the dev environments, or maybe pre-production” A proper pre-production (or “staging”) box that matches production as closely as possible Hopefully a pre-production box of some sort. But does it match production closely!? A production environment reproducible from source control A production box which has drifted significantly from anything in source control The big question is – how much time and effort are you going to invest in fixing these issues? In reality this just involves figuring out which new databases you’re going to create and where they’ll be hosted – VMs? Cloud-based? What about size/data issues – what data are you going to include on dev environments? Does it need to be masked to protect access to production data? And often the amount of work here really depends on whether you’re working on a new, greenfield project, or trying to update an existing, brownfield application. There’s a world if difference between starting from scratch with 4 or 5 clean environments (reproducible from source control of course!), and trying to re-purpose and tweak a set of existing databases, with all of their surrounding processes and quirks. But for a proper release management process, ideally you have: Dedicated development databases, An Integration server used for testing continuous integration and running unit tests. [NB: This is the point at which deployments are automatic, without human intervention. Each deployment after this point is a one-click (but human) action], QA – QA engineers use a one-click deployment process to automatically* deploy chosen releases to QA for testing, Pre-production. The environment you use to test the production release process, Production. * A note on the use of the word “automatic” – when carrying out automated deployments this does not mean that the deployment is happening without human intervention (i.e. that something is just deploying over and over again). It means that the process of carrying out the deployment is automatic in that it’s not a person manually running through a checklist or set of actions. The deployment still requires a single-click from a user. Actions: Get your environments set up and ready, Set access permissions appropriately, Make sure everyone understands what the environments will be used for (it’s not a “free-for-all” with all environments to be accessed, played with and changed by development). The Deployment Process As described earlier, most existing database deployment processes are pretty manual. The following is a description of a process we hear very often when we ask customers “How do your database changes get live? How does your manual process work?” Check pre-production matches production (use a schema compare tool, like SQL Compare). Sometimes done by taking a backup from production and restoring in to pre-prod, Again, use a schema compare tool to find the differences between the latest version of the database ready to go live (i.e. what the team have been developing). This generates a script, User (generally, the DBA), reviews the script. This often involves manually checking updates against a spreadsheet or similar, Run the script on pre-production, and check there are no errors (i.e. it upgrades pre-production to what you hoped), If all working, run the script on production.* * this assumes there’s no problem with production drifting away from pre-production in the interim time period (i.e. someone has hacked something in to the production box without going through the proper change management process). This difference could undermine the validity of your pre-production deployment test. Red Gate is currently working on a free tool to detect this problem – sign up here at www.sqllighthouse.com, if you’re interested in testing early versions. There are several variations on this process – some better, some much worse! How do you automate this? In particular, step 3 – surely you can’t automate a DBA checking through a script, that everything is in order!? The key point here is to plan what you want in your new deployment process. There are so many options. At one extreme, pure continuous deployment – whenever a dev checks something in to source control, the CI process runs (including extensive and thorough testing!), before the deployment process keys in and automatically deploys that change to the live box. Not for the faint hearted – and really not something we recommend. At the other extreme, you might be more comfortable with a semi-automated process – the pre-production/production matching process is automated (with an error thrown if these environments don’t match), followed by a manual intervention, allowing for script approval by the DBA. One he/she clicks “Okay, I’m happy for that to go live”, the latter stages automatically take the script through to live. And anything in between of course – and other variations. But we’d strongly recommended sitting down with a whiteboard and your team, and spending a couple of hours mapping out “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” NB: Most of what we’re discussing here is about production deployments. It’s important to note that you will also need to map out a deployment process for earlier environments (for example QA). However, these are likely to be less onerous, and many customers opt for a much more automated process for these boxes. Actions: Sit down with your team and a whiteboard, and draw out the answers to the questions above for your production deployments – “What do we do now?”, “What do we actually want?”, “What will satisfy our needs for continuous delivery, but still maintaining some sort of continuous control over the process?” Repeat for earlier environments (QA and so on). Rollback and Recovery If only every deployment went according to plan! Unfortunately they don’t – and when things go wrong, you need a rollback or recovery plan for what you’re going to do in that situation. Once you move in to a more automated database deployment process, you’re far more likely to be deploying more frequently than before. No longer once every 6 months, maybe now once per week, or even daily. Hence the need for a quick rollback or recovery process becomes paramount, and should be planned for. NB: These are mainly scenarios for handling rollbacks after the transaction has been committed. If a failure is detected during the transaction, the whole transaction can just be rolled back, no problem. There are various options, which we’ll explore in subsequent articles, things like: Immediately restore from backup, Have a pre-tested rollback script (remembering that really this is a “roll-forward” script – there’s not really such a thing as a rollback script for a database!) Have fallback environments – for example, using a blue-green deployment pattern. Different options have pros and cons – some are easier to set up, some require more investment in infrastructure; and of course some work better than others (the key issue with using backups, is loss of the interim transaction data that has been added between the failed deployment and the restore). The best mechanism will be primarily dependent on how your application works and how much you need a cast-iron failsafe mechanism. Actions: Work out an appropriate rollback strategy based on how your application and business works, your appetite for investment and requirements for a completely failsafe process. Development Practices This is perhaps the more difficult area for people to tackle. The process by which you can deploy database updates is actually intrinsically linked with the patterns and practices used to develop that database and linked application. So you need to decide whether you want to implement some changes to the way your developers actually develop the database (particularly schema changes) to make the deployment process easier. A good example is the pattern “Branch by abstraction”. Explained nicely here, by Martin Fowler, this is a process that can be used to make significant database changes (e.g. splitting a table) in a step-wise manner so that you can always roll back, without data loss – by making incremental updates to the database backward compatible. Slides 103-108 of the following slidedeck, from Niek Bartholomeus explain the process: https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/orchestration-in-meatspace As these slides show, by making a significant schema change in multiple steps – where each step can be rolled back without any loss of new data – this affords the release team the opportunity to have zero-downtime deployments with considerably less stress (because if an increment goes wrong, they can roll back easily). There are plenty more great patterns that can be implemented – the book Refactoring Databases, by Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage is a great read, if this is a direction you want to go in: http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Databases-Evolutionary-paperback-Addison-Wesley/dp/0321774515 But the question is – how much of this investment are you willing to make? How often are you making significant schema changes that would require these best practices? Again, there’s a difference here between migrating old projects and starting afresh – with the latter it’s much easier to instigate best practice from the start. Actions: For your business, work out how far down the path you want to go, amending your database development patterns to “best practice”. It’s a trade-off between implementing quality processes, and the necessity to do so (depending on how often you make complex changes). Socialise these changes with your development group. No-one likes having “best practice” changes imposed on them, so good to introduce these ideas and the rationale behind them early.   Summary The next stages of implementing a continuous delivery pipeline for your database changes (once you have CI up and running) require a little pre-planning, if you want to get the most out of the work, and for the implementation to go smoothly. We’ve covered some of the checklist of areas to consider – mainly in the areas of “Getting the team ready for the changes that are coming” and “Planning our your pipeline, environments, patterns and practices for development”, though there will be more detail, depending on where you’re coming from – and where you want to get to. This article is part of our database delivery patterns & practices series on Simple Talk. Find more articles for version control, automated testing, continuous integration & deployment.

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  • Is it possible to do A/B testing by page rather than by individual?

    - by mojones
    Lets say I have a simple ecommerce site that sells 100 different t-shirt designs. I want to do some a/b testing to optimise my sales. Let's say I want to test two different "buy" buttons. Normally, I would use AB testing to randomly assign each visitor to see button A or button B (and try to ensure that that the user experience is consistent by storing that assignment in session, cookies etc). Would it be possible to take a different approach and instead, randomly assign each of my 100 designs to use button A or B, and measure the conversion rate as (number of sales of design n) / (pageviews of design n) This approach would seem to have some advantages; I would not have to worry about keeping the user experience consistent - a given page (e.g. www.example.com/viewdesign?id=6) would always return the same html. If I were to test different prices, it would be far less distressing to the user to see different prices for different designs than different prices for the same design on different computers. I also wonder whether it might be better for SEO - my suspicion is that Google would "prefer" that it always sees the same html when crawling a page. Obviously this approach would only be suitable for a limited number of sites; I was just wondering if anyone has tried it?

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  • Unit testing an MVC action method with a Cache dependency?

    - by Steve
    I’m relatively new to testing and MVC and came across a sticking point today. I’m attempting to test an action method that has a dependency on HttpContext.Current.Cache and wanted to know the best practice for achieving the “low coupling” to allow for easy testing. Here's what I've got so far... public class CacheHandler : ICacheHandler { public IList<Section3ListItem> StateList { get { return (List<Section3ListItem>)HttpContext.Current.Cache["StateList"]; } set { HttpContext.Current.Cache["StateList"] = value; } } ... I then access it like such... I'm using Castle for my IoC. public class ProfileController : ControllerBase { private readonly ISection3Repository _repository; private readonly ICacheHandler _cache; public ProfileController(ISection3Repository repository, ICacheHandler cacheHandler) { _repository = repository; _cache = cacheHandler; } [UserIdFilter] public ActionResult PersonalInfo(Guid userId) { if (_cache.StateList == null) _cache.StateList = _repository.GetLookupValues((int)ELookupKey.States).ToList(); ... Then in my unit tests I am able to mock up ICacheHandler. Would this be considered a 'best practice' and does anyone have any suggestions for other approaches? Thanks in advance. Cheers

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  • Best way to produce automated exports in tab-delimited form from Teradata?

    - by Cade Roux
    I would like to be able to produce a file by running a command or batch which basically exports a table or view (SELECT * FROM tbl), in text form (default conversions to text for dates, numbers, etc are fine), tab-delimited, with NULLs being converted to empty field (i.e. a NULL colum would have no space between tab characters, with appropriate line termination (CRLF or Windows), preferably also with column headings. This is the same export I can get in SQL Assistant 12.0, but choosing the export option, using tab delimiter, setting my NULL value to '' and including column headings. I have been unable to find the right combination of options - the closest I have gotten is by building a single column with CAST and '09'XC, but the rows still have a leading 2-byte length indicator in most settings I have tried. I would prefer not to have to build large strings for the various different tables.

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  • How can I send an automated reply to the sender and all recipients with Procmail?

    - by jchong
    I'd like to create a procmail recipe or Perl or shell script that will send an auto response to the original sender as well as anybody that was copied (either To: or cc:) on the original email. Example: [email protected] writes an email to [email protected] and [email protected] (in the To: field). Copies are sent via cc: to [email protected] and [email protected]. I'd like the script to send an auto response to the original sender ([email protected]) and everybody else that was sent a copy of the email ([email protected], [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected]). Thanks

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  • SQLAlchemy - SQLite for testing and Postgresql for devlopment - How to port?

    - by StackUnderflow
    I want to use sqlite memory database for all my testing and Postgresql for my development/production server. But the SQL syntax is not same in both dbs. for ex: SQLite has autoincrement, and Postgresql has serial Is it easy to port the SQL script from sqlite to postgresql... what are your solutions? If you want me to use standard SQL, how should I go about generating primary key in both the databases?

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  • What is a good automated data import method for SQL Server?

    - by Joel Potter
    I'm in the process of porting some SQL Server 2005 databases to SQL Server 2008. One of these databases has an associated import application (Windows task) which uses SSIS with a DTS package to import a large dataset from an MS Access database nightly. In upgrading to SQL Server 2008, I discovered that I can't run the same console application which has been performing the imports due to the missing manageddts DLL in SQL Server 2008. It's several years old and in need of a rewrite for various reason, plus, I've been fairly unhappy with DTS in general. The original reason DTS was chosen was for speed (5 min import time compared to 30+ for ADO.NET). The format of the data to import is out of my control (the client likes Access). I would also like to be able to run the import from a machine completely separate from the server hosting SQL Server and preferably with minimal SQL features installed. Options I've considered: Creating an Access application to connect to both databases (SQL Server and Access) and perform the import (Ugh!) Revisiting ADO.NET to see if the original implementation was poorly written. Updated SSIS packages. What other technologies should I be considering for this job?

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  • iPhone:How to prepare app build to my client for testing?

    - by user187532
    Hi iPhone experts, I am a registered Apple developer. I am developing an iPhone application for my client. If i want to give my app build to my client for testing my build, do i need to create a build using my adhoc provisioning profile and send the build as well as my adhoc provisioning profile to my client? If yes, how can they install my build on their iPhone devices? Could someone guide me please? Thank in advance.

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  • Where can I find the transaction protocol used by Automated Teller Machines?

    - by Dave
    I'm doing a grad-school software engineering project and I'm looking for the protocol that governs communications between ATMs and bank networks. I've been googling for quite a while now, and though I'm finding all sorts of interesting information about ATMs, I'm surprised to find that there seems to be no industry standard for high-level communications. I'm not talking about 3DES or low-level transmission protocols, but something along the lines of an Interface Control Document; something that governs the sequence of events for various transactions: verify credentials, withdrawal, check balance, etc. Any ideas? Does anything like this even exist? I can't believe that after all this time the banks and ATM manufacturers are still just making this up as they go. A shorter question: if I wanted to go into the ATM software manufacturing business, where would I start looking for standards?

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  • Where do you manually insert assertions into an automated coded ui test's code in VS2010?

    - by user1649536
    I am currently automating smoke tests and I am trying to learn how to manually insert assertions with C# into the UImap.Designer.cs file. I am trying to learn how to do this manually but I have no direction on where to put the assertions and all the literature I am finding only covers how to add assertions with the CodedUI Test Builder tool that is included with VS2010. Can anyone direct me to where I need to insert the assertions?

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  • What wrapper class in C++ should I use for automated resource management?

    - by Vilx-
    I'm a C++ amateur. I'm writing some Win32 API code and there are handles and weirdly compositely allocated objects aplenty. So I was wondering - is there some wrapper class that would make resource management easier? For example, when I want to load some data I open a file with CreateFile() and get a HANDLE. When I'm done with it, I should call CloseHandle() on it. But for any reasonably complex loading function there will be dozens of possible exit points, not to mention exceptions. So it would be great if I could wrap the handle in some kind of wrapper class which would automatically call CloseHandle() once execution left the scope. Even better - it could do some reference counting so I can pass it around in and out of other functions, and it would release the resource only when the last reference left scope. The concept is simple - but is there something like that in the standard library? I'm using Visual Studio 2008, by the way, and I don't want to attach a 3rd party framework like Boost or something.

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  • Modern.IE VM license

    - by Thomas W.
    Microsoft provides some VMs for testing purposes (advertised on StackOverflow) and I'm trying to understand the license terms. The one I don't really understand is 1.b. You may use the software for testing purposes only. You may not use the software for commercial purposes. My thoughts: a) Testing a website in several browsers on several different virtual machines seems a quite professional approach. I hardly believe many private developers would do that. Of course they should, but which private developer has the time to do so? b) If that's really only available to private developers, what is the offer to companies doing the same thing? I am missing the advertisement for a paid service. My question as a non-native English speaker: Is testing by a company considered as a commercial purpose? Can I use the VMs within a company for testing or not?

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