DEVOPSdigest

Today’s business climate requires continuous innovation. Any speed bumps on the road to digital transformation are a disaster for organizations that are unable to keep up. The findings of an independent survey of IT leaders, application developers and database administrators, conducted by IDG Research for Datical, indicate that database administrators are unable to keep up with the pace and frequency of database changes caused by the accelerated pace of application releases, thus creating a bottleneck and delaying digital transformation initiatives. An overwhelming number of databases administrators (91 percent) and application development managers (90 percent) cited database updates as the cause for application release delays.

As the rate of change to applications increases, so does the rate of changes to the databases that applications rely on. The majority of database administrators stated the length of time needed to complete a change request has increased in the last year. On top of this, the growing pace of database releases has led to an increase in errors that could lead to poor application performance, application downtime or even worse insecure data.

30 percent of IT executives cited an increase in error rates in production applications caused by bad databases changes in the past year.

Despite the ability to build, test and deliver new and innovative applications capabilities faster, a similar level of proficiency does not exist when it comes to releasing database schema changes. As a result, the entire application release process grinds to a halt. Recognizing the importance of treating database code just like application code, a majority of respondents stated that they see the benefits of adopting database automation to help speed the delivery of application releases and solve these challenges.

Since database release processes contribute more than any other single factor to delaying application releases, this area is ripe for modernization and improvement. The database is and will remain absolutely the biggest bottleneck to delivering innovation. Database release automation promises to bring a powerful new approach to bear in the quest to deliver users more innovation faster, error-free and without compromising data security.

Methodology: The IDG Research, commissioned by Datical, was conducted in December 2016, and included high-qualified individuals, including database administrators, application development managers and staff, and IT managers. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to have involvement in the development and/or release of custom applications at an enterprise organization (1,000 or more employees).