Version Control life cycle

michael_west · Post by **michael_west** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:21 am

I need your advice on how Version Control can best help me manage the deveopment lifecycle. I have read the manual and tried it out on some test projects. Here is a process that I see may work and some of the issues I see with it. I am open to doing everything differently.

We have three environments:
Development
Test
Production

Lifecycle steps:
1. Export Production
2. Import Production into Developmentnt as baseline
3. Initialize Development into version control while incrementing release number
4. Developer team messes around and creates lots of batches as they initilize thier development changes.
5. Promote whole release to Test
6. Initialize more batches which fix known problems
7. Promote whole release to Production

The main issue I have with this approach is it does not work for deletes. I prefer not to delete in Version Control, but then I have to track my deletes outside of version control and unselect them when I Promote. If I delete in version control the deleted jobs still get selected when I select a release and will create many errors during promotion. How can I use version control to manage deletes?

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:39 am

I don't anyone promotes all jobs as a release. I don't trust VC that much. Everything is just done as a version to a single job. VC is limited in how much it can do.

Also VC needs its own project. Do not use Dev as your VC project.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 8:48 am

Going through this myself right now. Deletes are a PITA in Version Control. When jobs get renamed you end up with old and new names in VC and no good way to deal as it never really deletes anything.

HOWEVER, I was under the impression you could:

a) Allow logical 'deletes' to happen via the 'Allow Component Deletion' option.
b) Mark the old jobs as deleted.
c) Make sure the 'Display Deletes' option is not checked.

With that in place, does it still sweep up deleted jobs when you select 'All'?

kduke wrote:I don't think anyone promotes all jobs as a release.

I does.

michael_west · Post by **michael_west** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 9:19 am

When I

a) Allow logical 'deletes' to happen via the 'Allow Component Deletion' option.
b) Mark the old jobs as deleted.
c) Make sure the 'Display Deletes' option is not checked

Then select ALL the deleted jobs are selected though not displayed. During promotion I receive many errors for the deleted jobs ( and job componants I think ) which do not exist. This appears to result in a clean Promotion, but is not very comforting. I would like a way to select all except deleted. I expected that not displaying them would keep them from being selected, but it actually keep them from being unselected!

Thank you for your job renaming comment. I had not considered that issue.

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 9:24 am

Yuck. Suggest you call Ascential support and report that as a bug - as long as your version is 7.5.something.

kduke · Post by **kduke** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 9:37 am

I does.

_________________
Craig Hulett

You does. You promote all jobs as a release from test to prod?

chulett · Post by **chulett** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 9:48 am

I have promoted entire populations of jobs from VC into Test or Production when doing the initial loads. Just meant I don't always just do singletons or small groups.

michael_west · Post by **michael_west** » Thu Aug 25, 2005 9:58 am

I seem to have temporarily fixed my delete problem. I blew away my VERSION project and recreated it then initialized and deleted some jobs. Now the deleted jobs are not selected for promotion. I have noticed that the Version Control client crashes much more than the other datastage clients. Apparently my version control metadata was out of sync with the data.

Thanks you for your help!