DataVirtuality Synchronization: A new way to handle staging systems

In software development it is a good practice to test changes before rolling them out to a production instance, and business intelligence systems should be no exception to that. Therefore software development teams commonly use test or staging systems that mimic the production instance as close as possible. They offer an isolated environment without risking to interfere with any productive usage.

Once you applied changes on your staging instance there comes the point where you wish to push them to the production instance. Our new feature DataVirtuality Synchronization will help you doing this by:

• identifying what changes have been applied to the staging instance
• selecting a subset of changes you want to push to the production instance
• reviewing the changes and automatically push them to the production instance

Example

Let's go through an example. On our staging instance we added a new schema called "finance" with a "cashflow_report" view. In the already existing schema "marketing" we changed the view definition of "ad_spend" and removed "old_report". To synchronize those changes to production you can open the "Service" menu and click on "DataVirtuality synchronization".

A wizard will open that lists all changes which have been applied to the staging instance.
We can select a subset of changes that are supposed to be synchronized to production and click on "Finish". A confirmation dialog summarizes the selected items to double-check the selection:

When clicking on "Synchronize", DataVirtuality will send the corresponding SQL statements automatically to the production instance to update schemas, views, procedures and optimizations accordingly.

Usage

We are currently rolling out DataVirtuality Synchronization to selected customers for early feedback. If you are interested in becoming an early adopter, please reach out to us.

Currently the tool can synchronize schemas, views, procedures, jobs/schedules and optimizations.