Research has shown that implementing DevOps principles in application development workflows had, and continues to have, a profound impact on the software delivered. Teams adhering to these principles generally release software more often and with better quality than before. Even if they run into issues—a rarer occurrence—they typically recover from these sooner, too.
DevOps has been extensively covered in technical literature, conferences, social media, blogs, and video platforms. Unfortunately, despite being such a hot topic for years, stateful applications, i.e. applications using database backends, are rarely addressed in these. In fact, any information on how to perform Database CI (Continuous Integration) is hard to find.
Oracle published an initial version of its Implementing DevOps Principles with Oracle Database Tech Brief back in 2023 to fill this void. Since then, a lot has happened, but nothing came close to the revolution which occurred when Oracle’s SQL Developer Command Line (SQLcl), Oracle’s free multitool for database development and administration, introduced support for Database Application CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Delivery). The build-in CI/CD capabilities are built on years of experience developing and deploying enterprise-grade applications in-house and provides an opinionated framework. The Tech Brief has been updated to reflect these recent innovations.
Since the DevOps topic is so broad, further references have also been added to allow readers to dive deeper into the various aspects of DevOps and Database CI.
To learn how you can apply CI/CD to your database applications and production databases, read the updated version of Implementing DevOps Principles with Oracle Database.