Database DevOps looks set to become the norm in the next few years, though a hardcore of firms has no intention of getting with the programme anytime soon.

RedGate’s State of Database DevOps report showed the percentage of respondents who’d adopted a DevOps approach for some or all of their projects jumped from 52 per cent to 58 per cent in 2018, with a further 27 per cent planning to adopt DevOps in the next two years. It might be a surprise to some that 15 per cent of companies had no plans whatsoever to get involved with that DevOps stuff thank you very much – though this was down from 20 per cent last time around.

Adoption rates climbed with organisation size, at 51 per cent in orgs with under 26 employee showing, while in contrast, 70 per of organisations with more than 10,000 employees were on board. This gives the lie to perceptions that large organisations are stuck with legacy systems and approaches.

The biggest brake on adopting DevOps was a lack of skills in the team (21 per cent of respondents) followed by fears over disruption to existing workflows or business.

As for how well DBAs and developers were integrated, 62 per cent cited great or good collaboration, a figure that rose to 76 per cent in organisations that had gone DevOps across all their projects.

Retail, energy, government, education and non-profit sectors had the lowest rates of collaboration, with just half declaring that DBAs and devs had great or good collaboration.

DevOps usually means continuous delivery, even if just as an aspiration. Daily database changes were being pushed out by 13 per cent of respondents, while 27 per cent managed weekly changes, with 30 per cent deploying changes a couple of times a month. While 1 per cent did just one change a year, a surprising 2 per cent cited “other” as their answer.

Developers were taking an increased role in writing scripts for database deployments and deploying changes, at 75 per cent and 47 per cent respectively. This pattern was not so strong in financial services, healthcare and government with regulation and compliance one possible limiting factor.

Which may or may not explain why 61 per cent of respondents reckoned a DevOps style approach would have a positive impact on regulatory and compliance requirements.

Unfortunately, two thirds of respondents said their organisations’ database was NOT part of of  the automated build and deploy basis.

As for getting to a full automated process for deploying changes, one fifth reckoned they could do this in under 6 months, while 32 per cent reckoned 6 to 12 months should do it. Another fifth reckoned it would take them more than 2 years.

Getting hold of the servers could be part of the challenge. Just 20 per cent of orgs had less than ten servers, with 11 per cent running 51 to 100, 15 per cent running 101 to 500, and 9 per running more than 1001. As to where those servers are, 31 per cent of companies ran a combination of cloud and on-prem, with 28 per cent being mostly on-prem, 22 per cent being all on prem, 10 per cent being allcloud, and 9 per cent being mostly cloud.