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.

This was my first public presentation of “Do You Know the Data Flow?”, which is always a little interesting. It’s a subject area I’m pretty comfortable with, though, and the presentation went smoothly. I got some great feedback on it (thanks, everyone), with several people telling me that they’d learned something new. For me, as a presenter, that’s great to hear, because I want people to feel like it was well worth their time to attend. Based on the feedback for this one, I’ll be putting it in my regular roster of presentations.

The slides from the presentation are located here.