I presented Continuous Delivery for Data Warehouses and Marts at the Charlote BI Group Tuesday night. They have a great group there and I look forward to going back.
This is one of my favorite topics, and I always get good questions. CBIG was no exception, with some great questions on managing database schema changes when using continuous delivery, how continuous delivery and continuous deployment differ, and how to manage this in a full BI environment.
One question came up that I needed to verify – “Can you call an executable from a post-deployment script in SSDT?” The scenario for this was running a third-party utility to handle some data updates. I have confirmed that the post-deployment scripts for SSDT can only execute SQL commands, so you can’t run executables directly from them. However, as we discussed at the meeting, you can add additional executable calls into the MSBuild scripts I demonstrated to manage that part of your deployment process.
I promised to make my presentation and demos available, so here they are. Please let me know if you have any questions.