Recently I had to re-tool our Continuous Integration and Deployment environments due to a Sitecore Helix based solution. As part of that process I ended up using Octopus Deploy for the first time and I love it. I do not know how I did not use it before. I will have an upcoming blog post on how I setup our Octopus Deploy environment.
As part of the Continuous Deployment using Octopus Deploy, I needed the production databases backed up before we pushed the code & items to the Production CM servers. Octopus gives you a lot of step template to do various tasks and some of them are related to the SQL Server.
There are a few specific to Sitecore as-well, one in particular by my Guitar friend Richard Seal.
The SQL templates rely on SQL Server PowerShell commandlets to run. Here is the process to install it and it has to be done in a specific sequence, unless you want to install everything. In my case, I wanted this to run in the context of the Production CM’s, so I kept it to what is necessary. Go to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=29065 and download & install the following in the order given below:
Once all three are installed you can use one of the SQL Server templates in Octopus and run it on that box.
If you have any questions or concerns, please get in touch with me. (@akshaysura13 on twitter or on Slack).