Pramod Sadalage presented on Agile Database Development. I'm slightly familiar with his work, as I have read Scott Ambler's Agile DBA book, on which I believe Pramod contributed. At the very least, the two have also written Database Refactoring together, so I pretty much knew about the topic. I have been taking notes in OneNote all through the conference, and I created a page on which I'm listing things I need to do when I get back to the office (things to research more, or things to talk to someone about - mostly things we should consider re-evaluating). My list of things to re-evaluate grew greatly during this talk. There are lots of little things we could do better database-wise, with regards to our adoption of Scrum.

Our DBA's have a database build script, but its hardly automated, and it depends upon some crazy Access application to run it (yes, you read that right - an Access application to build a SQL Server database). The database team also uses a crazy versioning scheme in SoresSafe. But more importantly, we don't really include them like we should, and talk to them about what we are trying to achieve, and it causes conflict.

The coolest thing Pramod demonstrated was dbdeploy. It doesn't really do anything all that crazy, and yet what it does is pure genius. It will run a series of scripts to bring your database up to date, and also allow you to roll back to an older version. You have to write the scripts, but it manages the process for you, and makes it real easy to get an up to date database for you development or QA environment, or even production (although if your DBAs are squeamish, it will generate the script necessary to go from one version to another). Its nothing complicated, and yet incredibly elegant.