Phil Factor, Author at Redgate

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.

Supporting Monolithic Database Deployment with Flyway

This article explains how a Flyway migration-first approach, backed by consistent versioning and testing, helps teams bring structure and repeatability to even the most complex release processes. Coupled with techniques such as branch-based development, Flyway can help turn large, fragile deployments into smaller, more frequent, and more reliable operations. Read more

Creating Custom Regex Rules for Code Analysis in Flyway

Every development team has its own coding standards. While Flyway provides built-in rules focused on security and data protection, teams quickly find they need additional checks to maintain SQL code quality and consistency across their projects. This article will walk through the ways of defining and testing custom rules, provides a starter pack of... Read more

Getting Started with Flyway SQL Code Analysis Rules

Before you apply pending SQL migration scripts, Flyway can automatically check them for a range of code smells. The check -code command can perform a static code analysis on these scripts to check that they comply with a set of rules designed to encourage good coding practices. You can opt to use SQL Fluff,... Read more

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

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

Comparing Databases and Generating Schema Models with Flyway

This article explains how to compare databases and generate schema models using Flyway Enterprise CLI with PowerShell. It allows developers and DBAs to identify schema differences between environments and create schema models that capture the current state of a database, making it easier to track and review changes over time. Read more

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

Defusing Flyway Validation Errors using Smarter Checksum Comparisons

This article provides a scripted SQL tokenizer script that quickly verifies whether a Flyway validation error is a real cause for concern, due to retrospective metadata changes, or just the result of a developer valiantly adding formatting and documentation to improve the code. If the changes are purely cosmetic, we can safely run Flyway... Read more

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

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Posts by

Phil Factor