This is the first post from d-band. We're not launching a product today. We're introducing ourselves.
We Built What We Needed
A few years ago, we were running database deployments across multiple environments, multiple databases, and multiple tools. Liquibase for one system, SSDT for another, custom shell scripts to glue it all together, a shared spreadsheet to track what actually deployed where.
It worked. Until it didn't.
The spreadsheet went stale. Scripts diverged between environments. A rollback that should have taken ten minutes took three hours because nobody could say with confidence what state the target database was actually in.
We looked for a tool that could tie all of this together — something that sat on top of the tools we already had, tracked deployment history properly, handled credentials securely, and let us run a full release across multiple databases without stitching together a dozen scripts.
We didn't find one that hit all of those marks without a significant license cost or a full platform migration.
So we built one.
Who We Are
d-band is a small team of data engineers and DevOps practitioners. We do consulting work — helping organizations build and maintain data infrastructure — and alongside that, we build tooling.
We're not a VC-backed startup optimizing for growth metrics. We're practitioners who got frustrated with a gap in the ecosystem and decided to fill it.
That gap is database release management. Not version control — that problem is largely solved. Release management: the process of taking your versioned schema changes and actually getting them deployed, reliably, with a full audit trail, across all the databases you care about.
What We Believe
A few things we think are true about tooling in this space:
Open-source is the right model. Database tooling has a long history of "free tier, enterprise price." We think that creates the wrong incentives. When a tool is fully free and open-source, the authors have to earn trust through quality, not through feature gating.
Don't replace what works. Liquibase and Flyway are good tools. SSDT is genuinely useful for SQL Server shops. We're not interested in building a competitor to those tools — we're interested in building the layer above them that handles the parts they don't.
History matters. Every deployment should be recorded. Not in a log file that someone might or might not check — in a queryable release history that's part of your workflow. When something goes wrong at 2am, you should be able to answer "what changed, when, and where" in under a minute.
Security shouldn't be an afterthought. Connection strings containing credentials shouldn't live in plaintext config files. This is obvious in principle and routinely ignored in practice. We built credential encryption into drm-cli from the start.
What We're Releasing
Our first public tool is drm-cli — a free, open-source database release manager that layers on top of Liquibase, Flyway, and SSDT.
It handles:
- Release history tracking — every deployment recorded, queryable, auditable
- Encrypted credentials — connection strings encrypted at rest
- Automated retries and failure recovery — deployments that recover gracefully when something transient goes wrong
- Multi-database releases — SQL Server, PostgreSQL, and Oracle in a single coordinated release
- Pre/post deployment scripts — steps that always run before or after every deployment
- Cross-platform — Windows, Linux, macOS
We're not going to go deep on any of those today. Each of them deserves its own post, with real config examples and real commands. That's what's coming over the next several weeks.
Why Post Here
We're building in public because we think that's how open-source tooling should work.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be posting technical tutorials, honest write-ups of what we got wrong and had to rethink, and a full walkthrough of what drm-cli v1.1 can do. Not press releases — actual technical content that's useful whether or not you ever touch our tool.
If any of this is relevant to problems you're dealing with, follow along. We'd rather earn readers through useful content than through a product announcement.
Where to Find Us
- GitHub: github.com/d-band/drm-cli — the repo, the docs, and the issue tracker
- drm-cli docs: full documentation is in the repo
- This blog — we'll be posting here regularly
Next week: what drm-cli actually is, what problem it solves, and why Liquibase and Flyway alone aren't enough for release management.
We're d-band. We build things we need. If you need them too, that's a bonus.
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