Redgate Blog

Posts by
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 <strong><a href="http://www.simple-talk.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Simple Talk</a></strong> and <strong><a href="http://www.sqlservercentral.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">SQLServerCentral</a></strong>.

22 August 2022

22 August 2022

Managing Static Data in Flyway Database Development

If your database application requires 'static data' to function, then the best way to manage that data is using a view based on a derived table. This article demonstrates ways to create these views, depending on your RDBMS's capabilities, and how to build and manage them in development work, using… Read more

11 August 2022

11 August 2022

Managing Datasets for Database Development Work using Flyway

A cross-RDBMS way of exporting, deleting and inserting data, for database development work. It is a PowerShell automation technique for Flyway that uses JSON files for data storage. It should help a team maintain datasets between database versions, as well as to switch between the datasets required to support different… Read more

5 August 2022

5 August 2022

The Uses of Dependency Information in Database Development

Dependency information will allow you to avoid errors during a database build or tear-down, by ensuring you create or remove objects in the right order. It will also help you to avoid future 'invalid object' errors, because it will allow you to check that no database alterations have introduced broken… Read more

invalid object errors

1 August 2022

1 August 2022

Performance Testing Databases with Flyway and PowerShell

Performance tests are central to the quality of the database changes we deliver because they ensure that any business process that accesses the database continues to return its results in an acceptable time. When Flyway creates a new version of the database, it is the ideal time to run these… Read more

26 July 2022

26 July 2022

Running Unit and Integration Tests during Flyway Migrations

In this article I'll give a practical example of developing a database, with Flyway, in such a way that it is automatically tested with whatever unit tests and integration tests you specify whenever you migrate the branch you're working on to the next version. If a test fails, you can… Read more

21 July 2022

21 July 2022

Basic Functional Testing for Databases Using Flyway

How to use Flyway Teams to run basic tests whenever it successfully executes a migration, checking that all the business processes supported by our database always produce the expected results. Read more

29 June 2022

29 June 2022

Searching a Flyway Database

As a database gets larger, and development more complex, so it becomes increasingly necessary to be able to search for strings in the source files and the database itself. Maybe you need to find when a table first got created, when a foreign key was added, or to find out… Read more

27 June 2022

27 June 2022

Building a Database with Flyway

Flyway, especially Flyway Teams edition, can be used in several different ways to accommodate a database development that was originally based on builds rather than migrations. This article explores four different ways to use Flyway to build a particular version of a database, from the ground up, using a single… Read more

24 June 2022

24 June 2022

Increasing the Visibility of Database Changes in Flyway Development

If you save a metadata 'model' for every new version of a database created by Flyway, you can compare the current model to the previous one to see what changed. In turn, you can then generate a database E-R diagram that highlights the changed objects, instantly making those changes visible… Read more

30 May 2022

30 May 2022

Taming Database Documentation with Flyway and MySQL

Database object documentation is essential for explaining to busy developers, and the wider business, the purpose of each object and how to use it. The solution presented in this article consists of a SQL script to allow developers to add comments to MySQL database objects, without affecting the database version,… Read more