Is SCA going away?

PeterDanielsCRB

Not seeing much new dev for SCA, and in the main redgate web page, it's not even listed under products. Do we need to be rethinking our DB devops strategy? Flyway enterprise? we've been using sca for several years.

Jon_Kirkwood

@PeterDanielsCRB

 

Thank you for reaching out on the Redgate forums regarding your SQL Change Automation inquiry.

 In a short-answer, SCA is not going away at this point. 

There are some changes within our deployment-based suite of products as we expand past SQL Server only based databases and become more database-agnostic.

In this regard our Flyway Desktop solution is growing to be a replacement product. 

 

Flyway Desktop is the next version of SQL Change Automation.  

They can be installed side-by-side. SQL Change Automation is still available for sale and is being actively maintained and supported.  

We will continue to support this for at least three years after we stop new sales.  Support should run through at least the end of year 2025. 

 

If you wish to discuss your specific usage of SQL Change Automation and if Flyway may be a better fit within your organisation I would certainly recommend a conversation with our sales team (sales@red-gate.com).

Flyway is available in different tiers which can offer a greater flexibility between cost & functionality to find a good usage point for your needs.

Some details on the functionality contained at different tiers can be viewed here - https://documentation.red-gate.com/fd/feature-glossary-165740620.html

And some specific information about migrating SQL Change Automation to Flyway can be viewed here - https://documentation.red-gate.com/fd/sql-change-automation-164167863.html

PeterDanielsCRB

Thank you, @Jon_Kirkwood. I think a convo with our sales rep (for crbusa/crb group) will be helpful.  I'm trying to track down who that is now.

I'm especially curious about how the newer tools will fit in with a more cloud-centric architecture (ADF/syanpse/Azure SQL/Lakehouse/etc.)

Quick question: will our existing full SQL Toolbelt licenses give us access to all of the new flyway tools?

Jon_Kirkwood

Hi @PeterDanielsCRB

I shall attempt to get in contact with the appropriate sales resource from my side too as a conversation would certainly be useful.

For your question about Toolbelt licenses; I don't believe they would - but it would require clarification from sales. I believe Flyway is part of our Redgate Deploy bundle of products and not the SQL Toolbelt.

I would trust that a discussion with the sales team would evaluate your existing licensing and future requirements to ensure you are getting the right product/s

PeterDanielsCRB

Thanks, @Jon_Kirkwood.  Phillip Keebler already got in touch with me.  We're just trying to find a time window to meet. I will admit that I (and my manager) will be a little upset about having to add more $ to get flyway licenses on top of the toolbelt and SQL monitor $ we are spending. Let's hope that is not the case.

JR_AUS

Hi @Jon_Kirkwood and @PeterDanielsCRB,

I thought I might chip in my thoughts, having found this conversation as a result of some months of frustration using Flyway, as a Flyway Enterprise subscriber.

I'll begin by saying that I think Red Gate's direction and progress for Flyway makes sense, and I can see that it will, ultimately, be an invaluable tool for database teams. That said, over the last few months I have had very long days trying to get it to work in our environment. The specific issue I have had has been with cross-database dependencies, including circular dependencies; Flyway just doesn't handle these well when a deployment to a database we can control has a dependency in an external database that we cannot. Where the external database has an object dropped that is referenced in our baseline, even if we are no longer using that object, Flyway simply stops with an error, even though the change could otherwise be deployed successfully. The behaviour makes sense, as Flyway sees an inconsistency between the baseline and the intended deployment. However, that is small comfort when there are changes that need deploying, which will function as intended, and the tool won't allow it. I recognise that Phil Factor and other celebrated database professionals have written articles to address the issues I raise here, however these solutions don't appear to scale well (we have thousands of dependencies). Further, with a very small team, time to implement them alongside the daily need to deploy changes makes them unattractive at best.

The reason I am posting this comment here is because I noticed that our Flyway Enterprise subscription currently includes SQL Change Automation, SQL Source Control and SQL Clone, for which I am now thankful! In short, the Flyway issues I have had around maintaining state in source control and being able to deploy to various environments with many external dependencies are easily managed using these older tools. SQL Clone is an amazing tool and makes trivial the task of setting up databases on developer machines. Add to that that those same databases can then be source controlled using SQL Change Automation, SQL Source Control, or a combination of each, and easily deployed with no errors.

My hope is that Red Gate takes its time in changing customers over to Flyway and covers off some of the difficulties that I have mentioned, that are already addressable with existing toolsets.

cc: @Peter_Laws