When I started as a developer and an accidental DBA, most of my administration routines and my deployments to production were done manually. Tests were more or less exclusively end-to-end-tests, performed by clicking in the UI.

Since then a lot of things happened. When DBAs used to take care a dozen SQL instances, they now have hundreds. Databases grew bigger and code is deployed to production much more often.

On this training day, I will share my experience with automation for DBAs and database developers. This includes:

- Automating SQL Server health checks using PowerShell, dbatools and dbachecks
- Database projects to enable CI/CD for SQL Server databases
- Azure pipelines for automation and scheduling
- Automated database tests using containers and database projects and tSQLt.