Git for DBAs: 1- Introduction

Version control becomes a required skill for most of IT professionals not only software engineers, and DBAs are not the exception, version control can make the life of DBAs much easier and can be used to accomplish many goals like:

1. Having a unified single of truth of organization's database scripts.
2. Keeping track with all versions of administrative SQL scripts being used by organization's DBAs.
3. Organizing the process of application's database scripts deployment being developed by software/database developers, and keeping track with all those scripts.

And the examples have no limit, based on the needs of every organization.

During this post and the upcoming ones, we will talk about the version control concept and use of it in the database world, since it is a relatively new concept for DBAs compared by software engineers or system administrators/engineers, however it becomes an essential skill for DBAs too.

During the upcoming posts, we will be covering the following points:

1. The concept and history of version control.
2. The types of version control and the distributed version control systems "DVCS".
3. What is Git, GitHub and GitLab?
4. Using Git as a local version control system.
5. Basic Git operations for databases and database SQL scripts.
6. Using GitHub and GitHub enterprise for collaboration.

By the end of this series of Git and version control for DBAs, you as a DBA will be able to use the concept of version control to manage your database environment and scripts and implement this concept using Git.