Source: 126kr.com (survey data originally published circa 2017)
A DevOps survey of 1,000 software professionals — including developers, database administrators, and managers — shed light on the real-world state of database DevOps. More than half of the companies involved employed over 500 people, giving the results reasonable weight across mid-to-large enterprise environments.
Top-Line Findings
- Within two years of the survey, 80% of companies were expected to have adopted DevOps.
- The primary driver for including the database in DevOps pipelines is increasing the speed of database change delivery.
- The biggest obstacles to DevOps adoption are a shortage of skills and a lack of alignment between development and operations teams.
Those headlines are significant on their own, but the deeper findings — particularly around the database — are where the survey becomes genuinely instructive for engineers trying to extend DevOps practices beyond application code.
Do Developers Work Across Both Databases and Applications?
The answer, consistently across all companies surveyed, is yes. Roughly 75% of developers are responsible for both database and application development. This challenges the idea that database work belongs exclusively to a dedicated DBA team — in practice, full-stack responsibility is already the norm.
The numbers go further:
- 60% of developers build database deployment scripts.
- 39% are responsible for deploying database changes to production.
- In companies that have already adopted DevOps, those figures rise to 74% building scripts and 45% handling production deployments.
The implication is clear: if you are a developer without strong database or SQL skills, closing that gap is increasingly important to your day-to-day effectiveness.
How Frequently Are Database Changes Deployed?
Deployment frequency is one of the clearest indicators of DevOps maturity, and the database is no exception.
- 44% of companies practicing database DevOps deploy database changes daily or more than once per week.
- Among companies with no plans to adopt DevOps, that figure drops to 28%.
One interpretation is that teams without DevOps simply face less pressure to release frequently. However, the answer to the next question complicates that reasoning.
What Is the Greatest Drawback of Traditional Siloed Database Development?
Survey respondents ranked the following as the top drawbacks of keeping database development separate from application development:
- Increased risk of failed deployments or downtime when introducing database changes.
- Slow development and release cycles.
- Inability to respond quickly to changing business requirements.
- Poor communication between development and operations teams.
Teams are broadly aware these problems exist. The more interesting question is what is preventing them from acting on that awareness.
What Is the Biggest Challenge in Integrating Database Changes into DevOps?
The leading challenge is synchronizing application and database changes and bridging the different working approaches of development and operations teams. This is somewhat ironic — the very problem that motivates DevOps adoption in general is also what makes extending DevOps to the database hard.
There is, however, a positive feedback loop at work. Once DevOps practices are embedded in application development, many of the coordination and communication issues begin to resolve themselves — making the extension of those practices to the database progressively easier.
How Long Will Full Database Deployment Automation Take?
This question produced arguably the most revealing result in the entire survey:
- 43% of respondents who had not yet adopted DevOps estimated it would take longer than two years to fully automate database change deployments.
- By contrast, 68% of those already practicing DevOps expected to achieve the same goal in less than one year.
Given the broad mix of industries and company sizes in the survey, this gap is not easily explained by selection bias. The more likely explanation is a compounding effect: once an organisation invests in DevOps tooling, culture, and automation for application delivery, those foundations make it substantially faster to extend the same practices to database change management.
What This Means for Your Team
The survey paints a consistent picture: the database is not an afterthought in DevOps maturity — it is a meaningful and often lagging part of the pipeline. Teams that ignore database DevOps risk accumulating exactly the bottlenecks and deployment risks they were trying to eliminate. The good news is that investment in DevOps practices generally accelerates the ability to bring the database along with it. Starting with version-controlled migration scripts, integrating database changes into CI pipelines, and establishing shared responsibility between developers and DBAs are all practical first steps.
Note: Survey data cited in this article originates from a 2017 study attributed to 126kr.com. Figures should be interpreted in their historical context; adoption rates and tooling have evolved considerably since publication.