Deploy 80X faster: Self-serve database changes for the leading provider of global real estate data 

Database DevOps streamlines mergers, cloud migrations, and constant schema changes

Self-serve deployments
Easy cloud migrations
Seamless IaC integration
Real estate
Industry
6,000 + employees
Size
Liquibase Pro
Solution
80x
Faster database schema updates
100%
Automation of database objects & permissions
90%
Fewer manual reviews
40+
Hours of work saved per week

The global leader in real estate information and analytics spent too much time managing database changes across its growing portfolio of brands. Instead of rapidly delivering more, new, and better data to their customers, they were stuck in slow, manual, error-prone database change workflows.

By integrating database DevOps into their Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) pipeline with Liquibase, the real estate intelligence and marketplace now automates database deployments in a couple hours, instead of three weeks – 99% faster and drastically more frequent, reliable, and consistent.

"In the old times, it used to take at least a couple, if not four or five, days to push a change through each environment. But it’s much faster using the CI/CD for Liquibase.”

DBA Senior Technical Manager

They can now focus on analyzing, optimizing, and modernizing their expanding data pipeline while supporting cloud migrations and database mergers.

“With Liquibase, database deployments went from weeks to just a couple of hours. Developers can now manage their own changes, freeing up DBAs to focus on higher-value tasks like performance optimization and monitoring.”

Sr. Cloud Delivery Specialist

“Now it’s totally operated by the dev team. They can leverage the integrated pipeline and deploy their changes whenever they need — hotfix, emergency release, or regular updates.”

Sr. SQL Database Administrator

Developers

Integrated, self-serve workflows with instant feedback and no delay

DevOps & CloudOps

Fast, seamless, error-free deployments within existing architecture

DBAs

Freedom from manual reviews and space to optimize and innovate

IT leaders

Scalable deployments to support growth, migrations, and mergers

Siloed and inefficient database updates

With vast and complex real estate data pipelines spanning the globe and a variety of brands, manually managing database changes was already a frustrating slowdown for the real estate data company’s developers, database administrators (DBAs), and CloudOps teams.

From its origin as a commercial real estate database and analytics service, the enterprise expanded and acquired a $2.5 billion empire. It includes top brands and websites for home, rental, land, business, and other real estate-related marketplaces plus domains for news and analytics. These acquisitions give them an international presence requiring 24/7 availability and multilingual support.

A workflow bottleneck degraded their abilities to deploy changes with any sort of speed or reliability. Developers relied on DBAs to execute schema updates, causing delays and increasing the risk of error for standard updates, hotfixes, integrations, and cloud migrations.

“In the old days, we used to go environment by environment manually. Each environment could take days to prepare and execute changes.”

DBA Senior Technical Manager

Database changes took up to five days per environment (development, test, staging, and production), leading to delays of three weeks, in many cases.

Bringing newly acquired databases into the pipeline

While managing an ecosystem of historical and real-time real estate and financial data, DBAs and CloudOps also fielded changes coming from more new and unfamiliar data sources than ever before. The real estate information group expanded to include 15+ (and counting) acquired brands, inflaming the issue with massive data integration requirements.

Merging these disparate systems into a cohesive and reliable data asset was critical to unlocking the full value of these investments for the business and its expanding customer base. Yet the cumbersome, inconsistent, resource-intensive database change management process stood in the way.

Unprepared for cloud modernization

The real estate marketplace, news, and data company’s shift to a cloud-first approach meant an initiative to modernize and integrate all its platforms and systems. DBAs worked closely with CloudOps to migrate every environment into the cloud, yet struggled with:

  • Cloud compliance, security, and governance
  • Consistency and quality between cloud and legacy environments
  • Scaling cloud database operations quickly
  • Simplifying and streamlining change management

“Without automation, every deployment required multiple approvals and hands-on intervention, taking at least four or five days just to get through staging.”

Sr. SQL Database Administrator

Growing complexity and inefficiency called for a scalable solution to automate these database changes, streamline dataset integrations, and support their cloud-first goals.

Seamless integration of database DevOps

“We needed a tool that could support rapid deployment and also integrate well with our existing CI/CD tools.”

Sr. Cloud Delivery Specialist

After evaluating various solutions, considering homegrown patches, and gaining a deep understanding of their core users’ (developers) needs, the DBA/CloudOps team turned to Liquibase.

“For our environments, we needed something flexible and scalable, and Liquibase fit into our existing CI/CD framework seamlessly. It handles schema changes efficiently and integrates right into our existing workflows.”

DBA Senior Technical Manager

Starting with Liquibase OSS, a few teams quickly and easily rolled out:

  • Basic change deployment automation
  • Database version control
  • Rollback capabilities

“Liquibase was used by a couple of teams and had proven to be stable and reliable. It wasn’t just a random choice – it was informed by real use cases and the trust those teams had developed.”

Sr. Cloud Delivery Specialist

Automation and adaptability for scaling complex pipelines

Given its trust in Liquibase to deploy changes, the team turned next to Liquibase Pro to roll out database DevOps with advanced automation, governance, and observability capabilities they needed:

  • Full CI/CD automation and integration
  • Flows (self-serve database changes)
  • Targeted Rollbacks
  • Drift Detection
  • Policy Checks
  • Structured Logging (data pipeline analytics)
  • Operation Reports
  • Secrets Management

Liquibase helps the global real estate data provider to streamline their database changes across a sprawling, diverse, and complex real estate data infrastructure. By automating with Liquibase Pro, database schema updates are 99% faster than before.

The database team easily and seamlessly fit Liquibase into their CI/CD pipeline, automating deployment processes across multiple development, testing, and production environments. Liquibase integrates with their existing pipelines including Amazon RDS, Azure DevOps, Docker, and other leading DevOps tools for a painless and reliable change management workflow.

This new database DevOps workflow enables faster cloud migrations and simplifies the integration of databases, applications, and pipelines that come with their acquired brands. As Liquibase implementation expanded from a few teams to all of its business units, it easily scales to handle the globally dispersed database ecosystem, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQL Server environments.

Liquibase Pro unlocks 80x faster database changes

Liquibase accelerated the multi-brand real estate data company’s database deployments from a nearly three-week-long process to one that launches in less than a couple hours: 80x faster database schema changes.

The organization transformed its data pipeline agility with Flows, a Liquibase Pro capability that automates consistent and standardized process templates. Flows enable developers to fire off schema evolutions whenever they need – with full trust in testing, validation, and deployment.

“We’ve minimized our queue of tasks for DBAs. Developers now handle most of the work themselves, which is a big help on our side.”

Sr. SQL Database Administrator

Accelerating cloud migrations with database DevOps

Liquibase’s seamless integration with the existing IaC (infrastructure as code), including Amazon RDS environments managed through Azure DevOps, helped the implementation team modernize CloudOps while maintaining control.

These automated database cloud migrations ensure consistent, secure changes while reducing the risk of schema mismatches across environments.

“We implement almost everything as infrastructure as code. Liquibase fits right into this model, helping us keep database changes in step with cloud migrations.”

Sr. Cloud Delivery Specialist

Safely automating database mergers

Liquibase allows the fast-growing data company to unify acquired databases quickly and reliably, unlocking maximum value from their investments as quickly as possible.

Merging databases from newly acquired brands was no small feat, but Liquibase brought governance and reliability to the integration workflows with Policy Checks and Drift Detection to ensure consistency at speed. They can also tap Liquibase’s Structured Logging for workflow performance monitoring and optimization insights through their existing Datadog dashboards.

“Whenever we acquire new companies, they’ll have different platforms on their end. We merge them into ours, and with Liquibase, we can do it efficiently.”

DBA Senior Technical Manager

Agile data pipelines for growth and innovation

Liquibase equips database and development teams with an easy, reliable, and fast way to bring new databases into the fold and consistently push out global structural enhancements.

“Now, developers manage their own changes. It’s completely shifted how we handle database updates, enabling us to scale while improving quality.”

Sr. SQL Database Administrator

The international real estate data and marketplace organization’s IaC workflows – now complete with database-as-code integration, thanks to Liquibase – position them for future advancements in cloud, database, AI/ML, and industry-specific advancements.

The details and individuals mentioned in this case study reflect accurate information as of the publication date.