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 Simple Talk and SQLServerCentral.

Phil Factor

25 February 2025

Phil Factor

25 February 2025

Scripting Databases with Flyway Enterprise CLI

This article will cover the basics of the Flyway generate command and how it can auto-generate several types of Flyway migration scripts. This includes versioned migrations that, after testing, can be used to deploy changes, and baseline migration and undo scripts that are useful for a range of development tasks. Read more

Phil Factor

7 February 2025

Phil Factor

7 February 2025

Splatting in Flyway to Avoid Tedious Typing

This article covers splatting, explaining the advantages of using it with Flyway. We create reusable parameter sets and combine them as needed, using PowerShell. This simplifies multi-parameter Flyway commands, and makes it easier to execute consecutive Flyway operations within a pipeline. Read more

Phil Factor

2 January 2025

Phil Factor

2 January 2025

Using JSON Output to Track and Log Flyway Migration Activity

Flyway's JSON output provides a lot of useful information about the migrations files, database, and version changes, in a format that automated processes can read and use. This article demonstrates how we can create a Flyway callback that uses this JSON output to automatically send simple, human-readable notifications of what happened during a migration,... Read more

Phil Factor

14 November 2024

Phil Factor

14 November 2024

Simplifying Data Import and Export for Database Development

Extracting and importing data for development and testing is made trickier due to issues such as constraints, dependencies, and special data types. This article introduces a cross-RDBMS solution with JSON for data storage and PowerShell cmdlets that use ODBC to help automate extraction and import, and JSON Schema for validation. Just provide a DSN,... Read more

Phil Factor

12 September 2024

Phil Factor

12 September 2024

Forks in Flyway Database Development Work

Database forking allows teams to multi-task, working on different strands of development in parallel. It also allows them to manage several 'variants' of a production database, such as for SaaS applications with client-specific schema requirements. This article explains how Flyway supports and simplifies database forking, via use of Flyway's locations, baseline migrations and by... Read more

Phil Factor

3 September 2024

Phil Factor

3 September 2024

Instant Database Reset and Easier Bug Fixing using Clones

The article demonstrates how the use of lightweight, containerized clones removes the problem of 'mopping up' after a database migration fails part way through, particularly in database systems like MySQL that don't support DDL transaction rollback. A quick reset to the previous saved revision provides 'instant rollback'. It also demos how they make it... Read more