On the importance of CI/CD practices for database applications

Abstract

Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) automate software integration and reduce repetitive engineering work. While the use of CI/CD presents efficiency gains, in database application development, this potential has not been fully exploited. We explore the state of the art in this area, with a focus on current practices, common software tools, challenges, and preconditions that apply to database applications. The work is grounded in a synoptic literature review and contributes a novel generic CI/CD pipeline for database system application development. Our generic pipeline was tailored to three industrial development use cases in which we measured the benefits of integration and deployment automation. The measurements demonstrate clearly that introducing CI/CD had significant benefits. It reduced the number of failed deployments, improved their stability, and increased the number of deployments. Interviews with the developers before and after the implementation of the CI/CD show that the pipeline brings clear benefits to the development team (i.e., a reduced cognitive load). These findings put current database release practices driven by business expectations, such as fixed release windows, in question.