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>.

11 January 2022

11 January 2022

Reporting on the Progress of a Flyway Database Development Project

This article demos a novel way to report on the progress of your Flyway development project. It provides both SQL and PowerShell versions of code that extracts information for each database version from the Flyway schema history table and then plots it in a Gantt chart. Read more

7 January 2022

7 January 2022

A Programmer’s Guide to Flyway Configuration

Phil Factor offers a programmer's guide to Flyway's configuration settings, explaining the different categories of parameters, the role of each of parameter within each category, and how to exploit Flyway's multi-level configuration file system. Read more

22 December 2021

22 December 2021

Debugging Flyway Callbacks and Migrations that Use Placeholders

Placeholders come in very handy in Flyway, but troubleshooting the SQL migration and callback scripts that use them can be tricky. This articles demonstrates how to develop, test and debug these scripts in a tool designed for these tasks, such as SSMS, leaving Flyway to do what it's designed for,… Read more

20 December 2021

20 December 2021

Testing a Flyway Database Migration

Often, we want to test the new version of a database, produced by a Flyway migration, before committing the new migration file, or to test the same migration run on a number of different databases. This article demonstrates how to do it, by generating and using JSON parameter files to… Read more

10 December 2021

10 December 2021

Exploring the Flyway Schema History Table

Flyway uses a schema history table to track the version of each database, recording in it every versioned migration file applied to build that version. It's worth understanding exactly how Flyway uses this table, the possible dangers of moving it to a non-default location and how to do it safely,… Read more

3 December 2021

3 December 2021

Reporting on Changes Made by Flyway Migration Scripts

Phil Factor demonstrates some PowerShell tasks that will produce a high-level overview, or narrative, of the main differences in the metadata between two versions of a database, during Flyway Teams migrations. Read more

24 November 2021

24 November 2021

Automating Flyway Undos

How to auto-generate first-cut undo scripts for every Flyway migration. For every new version of a database created by a Flyway versioned migration, we compare it to a 'source' directory containing object-level build scripts for the previous version. The SQL Compare engine does the rest, producing the associated undo script… Read more

19 November 2021

19 November 2021

Using Flyway Teams with SQL Change Automation PowerShell Cmdlets

Use Flyway to run your database migrations, each time automatically creating a SQL Change Automation release object to provide object-level scripts and a build script for the new version, along with change reports and code analysis reports. Read more

19 November 2021

19 November 2021

Exploring Auto-fix in SQL Code Analysis

Phil Factor presents a useful but slightly flawed 'table report' script as an adventure playground for exploring SQL Code analysis issues. He demonstrates use of the auto-fix feature, to arrive at a pristine script free from wavy green underlines. Read more

15 November 2021

15 November 2021

Bulk Loading Data via a PowerShell Script in Flyway

The test data management strategy for any RDBMS needs to include a fast, automated way of allowing developers to "build-and-fill" multiple copies of any version of the database, for ad-hoc or automated testing. The technique presented in this article uses a baseline migration script to create the empty database at… Read more