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.

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 types of testing. Read more

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 references, during Flyway migrations. Read more

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 performance checks. Read more

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 work out why, undo... Read more

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 which tables lack documentation.... Read more

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 migration script. It should... Read more

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 to other team members. Read more

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, and a simple way... Read more

Cross-RDBMS Version Checks in Flyway

How does one check that a database is definitively at the version that Flyway says it is? Or that a test teardown procedure leaves no trace in the database? Or verify that an undo script returns a database's metadata to that state it should be in for the version to which you're rolling back?... Read more

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Posts by

Phil Factor