DevOps seems to be everywhere and great discussions on all facets of DevOps and CI/CD, but one area that seems lacking is DevOps documentation.  Doing documentation has never been popular and often a neglected part of the development lifecycle.  Within the fast moving DevOps process documentation becomes even more important and needs to be automated along with all the other tasks in the DevOps world.

Documentation in the past meant extra time and extra costs and could delay upgrades and releases, but in the Agile/DevOps world delays cannot happen, and at the same time documenting changes becomes even more important. 

As databases and DBAs move into the DevOps world the need to quickly and accurately capture changes to the database takes on a critical importance.  Since all aspects of the DevOps process are now more tightly dependent on each area, it is very important to correctly document these changes for future DevOps cycles.

Toad and Toad Data Modeler fit the requirement and can help database developers and DBAs capture and automate Entity Relationship Diagrams, data models and the data dictionary.

Toad has several reports that can document the schemas, databases, pl/sql code, do compares and generate sync scripts to speed up the process and accurately capture all the required information from the database perspective. All of these steps can be automated with the Automation designer as well as Toad Intelligence Central working with your CI/CD server.

Toad Data Modeler (TDM) can quickly reverse engineer databases, schemas, and changes and generate a data dictionary report, and html reports including the data model and subject area decompositions.

Scripts within the automated DevOps processes also serve as documentation. They contain information about the database, system, server, and db software configuration, and they can serve as a detailed record of the DB deployment process.

DBA and database developers have been reluctant to embrace the DevOps world and even more so the documentation of the database and the steps in the CI/CD process, but with Toad and Toad Data Modeler this part of DevOps can be less painful and more efficient.

Learn more about Toad and Toad Data Modeler as well as all the Toad family products here in our Toad World Communities or visit quest.com/toad/

About the Author

Russell Tuttle

Quest Software

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