There aren't many frameworks for writing acceptance tests for databases, including SQL Server. FitNesse is an obvious choice since it is designed with a Wiki-style interface that, once it is configured and set up correctly, makes it very easy for a non-specialist to set up individual tests.

Developers are flocking to Ruby on Rails at an incredible pace. There's a great reason for this migration: Rails provides a robust framework built on one of the most flexible languages ever conceived. One of the tricks in the Rails bag is the concept of "Migrations." Migrations provide an excellent example of why developers would want to use the framework, and here's why: Generally speaking, managing changes to a database schema has been one of the most odious tasks for a team of developers. Most have relied on storing DDL in revision control, ever vigilant to ensure that our database creation scripts are updated and consistent with each rollout. That solution can be very clumsy in an Extreme Programming project. And because Rails encourages iterative development, it would be very easy to imagine the constant schema changes turning into nightmares. Fortunately, Migrations allows a developer to manage rollout, and rollback, of database schema changes in a controlled and consistent manner, and one that happens to feel very natural to a Rails programmer.

The job of a DBA requires a fusion of skill and knowledge. To acquire this requires a craftsman mindset. Craftsmen find that the better they get at the work, the more enjoyable the work gets, and the more successful they become. Deliberate practice, Specialization and an appetite for overcoming difficulty are good habits to deliberately adopt to successfully grow those craftsmanlike skills to the point that you become “so good they can’t ignore you”.

Agile methodologies work well with database developments only if great care is taken to do things right. It requires good judgement and leaves little room for error. Dev Nambi, in an extract from the book Tribal SQL, argues that Agile works for smart, curious, and experienced software engineers.

draws a comparison between two approaches to ORM-centric database development. One is based on the Python SQLAlchemy ORM tools, and the other uses standard Java JPA. Which is better? The result of comparing a simple use case for both languages is quite surprising.

Conflicting requirements, such as those related to security, performance, and economy, multiply the challenge of integration developments typical in programming in the oil-and-gas industry. One technique that can help ease the burden on slimmed-down development teams is to centralize database accesses through the open source SQL Relay product.

Often, an existing database application must evolve rapidly by incremental steps. Alex describes a tried and tested system to provide an automated approach to deploying both new and existing database systems, whilst dealing with common security and configuration issues.

One pattern that shows up repeatedly is creating a Many-to-Many relationship using a mapping class. In Rails, the hasMany/through directive provides this functionality. Grails doesn't have an explicit hasMany/through statement like Rails. Rather, Many-to-Many relationships are created implicitly by GORM via your domain classes.

The increasing use of XML asks for systems that store semi-structured data without forcing it into inadequate data structures. These requirements are met by both native XML databases and relational databases with integrated XML support. The question is: Why should you prefer a native XML database over an XML-aware classic database or the other way around? This article compares the approaches of a number of varying solutions, including eXist, Mark Logic, and IBM DB2 Express-C. The differences are translated into practical advantages and disadvantages.

Although it is possible to provide good service to small to medium companies as a DBA without putting in place systems and processes to manage the workload and the demands of teamwork, it isn't so in the larger enterprise. As well as standardizing and documenting, the enterprise DBA needs to centralize the management of systems.