Phil Factor, Author at Redgate

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Phil Factor

Phil Factor (real name withheld to protect the guilty), aka Database Mole, has 30 years of experience with database-intensive applications.

Despite having once been shouted at by a furious Bill Gates at an exhibition in the early 1980s, he has remained resolutely anonymous throughout his career.

He is a regular contributor to Simple Talk and SQLServerCentral.

The Flyway Info Command Explained Simply

If you need the current version of your Flyway database, and a history of the changes that were applied to build that version, then the info command is the place to go. It allows you to review applied and pending migrations, track migration status, and troubleshoot any issues that may have occurred during the... Read more

The Flyway Migrate Command Explained Simply

The 'Migrate' command automates the process of applying the database schema changes that are defined in migration scripts, while Flyway tracks the version of every copy of the database. This makes it much easier to maintain consistency across different database environments, and so facilitates continuous integration, continuous deployment, and database version control practices. Read more

Using Flyway as a Multi-Database Migration System

Flyway can scale easily to enterprise-scale database systems, even if they involve a mix of relational database systems, are cloud-based, containerized or involve complex authentication. This article demonstrates how we can use Flyway Teams to do a single-batch, multi-database migration, comprising SQL Server, Oracle Cloud, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite databases. Read more

How to Write and Debug a PowerShell Callback for Flyway Migrations

We can use callbacks in Flyway to plug into any part of the Flyway lifecycle and run various database tasks before or after a particular event takes place. In this article I've tried to assemble a 'best practice' guide for writing callbacks to ensure that the scripts always behave predictably, and so that when... Read more

Managing Test Datasets for a Database: What’s Required?

The management of datasets is intrinsic to effective team-based database development. This article reviews what's required of test datasets in database development and then proposes a system of managing them in a migration-based approach that adopts a common standard for their storage, using JSON. Read more

Planning a Database Testing Strategy for Flyway

With Flyway, you can adopt a test-driven development strategy that will allow you to test and evaluate databases, and database objects, at every phase of the database development lifecycle. The further down the delivery pipeline that bugs appear, the more costly in time and resources they are to fix. This approach will allow you... Read more

Running DOS Scripts as Callbacks with Flyway

How to perform a range of useful database tasks automatically during Flyway migrations, using a DOS callback script. We provide a demo script that will collect all the necessary information from Flyway, run the task and then save any file with the appropriate name. You can use it to automate tasks such creating backups... Read more

Using ODBC in PowerShell Scripts and Callbacks

Flyway connects to database using JDBC, but when we're automating Flyway with PowerShell, we can't use JDBC directly to get access to the metadata we need to add useful reports and other functionality to Flyway's build and migration processes. This article demonstrates how to get what we need using ODBC from our PowerShell scripts,... Read more

Failed Database Deployments: Roll Back or Fix Forward?

This article explains the different ways to reverse or accelerate your way out of the problems caused by a failed database deployment, where a technique such as feature flags fits into your strategy, and how Flyway is designed to help you ensure both that you're fully prepared to take swift remedial measures, and that... Read more

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Posts by

Phil Factor