Datical & Liquibase: Which one is right for you?

I talk to quite a few companies every year, comprising all shapes, sizes, and shades of Agile and DevOps. And within those companies, I like to hear from everyone – from the CIOs who make strategic budget decisions all the way to the developers and DBAs really making the engines hum. Throughout those organizations, there tends to be beliefs in and shared support for open source solutions. Every person at Datical shares that belief as well. After all, the company has a connection to Liquibase, a great piece of open source tech.

A look at the numbers

Within the spectrum of database management and automation scenarios, sometimes Liquibase will suffice and sometimes it won’t. Let’s set a little context to support that assertion and look at numbers from a poll of Liquibase community members.

• Over 90% of Liquibase users are developers
• 75% work at companies with fewer than 99 employees
• To take that a step further, 50% work for companies with fewer than 25 employees

The numbers tell the story. If you’re a developer at a one-man shop at a small or medium-sized business where you’re the only person generating SQL scripts and pushing out database changes, Liquibase will work very well for you. You’re probably not all that worried about maintenance, not concerned with database state, and don’t care about support for all database objects. Your top priority is probably modeling SQL into XML.

<Check out our guide: Choosing Between Liquibase and Datical to learn more>

Now, if you’re a DBA or part of a DevOps team in a more complex enterprise environment that has separate teams to support app development, test, QA and database management, and deployment, Datical is right for you.

Here’s how you’ll know Datical will work better for you and why:

• You have multiple projects and multiple pipelines that feed multiple applications from multiple databases. That’s a lot of multiplying. Datical can help tame that multiplication. Datical has helped database teams go from 20,000 labor hours committed to database deployments to 5,000 hours. Datical built specific functionality with the enterprise in mind, like an accelerator to deal with geographically dispersed systems and database teams. That’s enterprise-grade scaling plus cost savings and manpower efficiency that one-man shops aren’t concerned with.
• Objects matter. The frank truth is that extended database object and settings support is a requisite to take full advantage of the power and features of premium database platforms. That includes support for storage settings (tablespace assignments, partitioning, storage clauses, etc.), stored procedures, functions, packages, synonyms, triggers, check constraints and more. Datical enables snapshots, comparisons, forecasts, and execution of rules against all of these types of objects.
• Enterprises can’t afford to have business-critical or customer-facing applications go down. Downtime means massive, compounded losses in revenue. With features like forecasting, Datical keeps faulty database updates from making it through to production. Simulating the impact of changes means no errors get through (to the tune of a 95%+ decrease in faulty changes), and thus no application downtime.
• Your data is too valuable. It’s not just about getting the database schema updated; it’s also about keeping data safe and secure. Datical automates the enforcement of a company’s database security policies and ensures compliance via features like our Rules Engine and extends that control and visibility with reporting and auditing.
• Your organization can no longer wait to eliminate the application release bottleneck created by the slow pace of database deployments. It would take you forever to build out necessary tooling to deliver the functionality you can get with Datical now. Even if you don’t think you’ll need it all of these capabilities upfront, trust me – you’ll find out that you do quickly. If you take the DIY route, your developers are going to spend more time writing code for your database deployment tooling than they are for your actual business applications. Talk about getting trapped in a whirlpool of inefficiency.
• You need something that works with your application release automation tools and fits into your established DevOps processes – another bolt-on solution or proprietary approach won’t work. Datical fits right into your application delivery process right from the start with integrations to a host of application build and deploy solutions. It just works, without more time and investment on your team’s part.

Bottom line

If you work in an organization that has any level of complexity in data, teams, objects, and existing technology, you’ve moved beyond patchwork DIY solutions. You need a solution dynamic and robust enough to provide increased efficiency, security, compliance, and peace-of-mind. Datical simply delivers in all those departments.

Check out our guide: Choosing Between Liquibase and Datical to learn more