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

22 May 2024

Phil Factor

22 May 2024

Flyway’s Validate Command Explained Simply

The Validate command aims to ensure that Flyway can reliably reproduce an existing version of a database from the source migration scripts by warning you if files are retrospectively added, removed or altered that would prevent it from doing so. Validation errors are Flyway's warning that "the source for this version has changed". Read more

Phil Factor

13 May 2024

Phil Factor

13 May 2024

Flyway’s Clean Command Explained Simply

The Clean command resets a database to its initial state, before any Flyway migrations were applied. In other words, it empties the database. This can be useful for any development task that requires that you recreate the database structure, or for tearing down a test harness. It also allows you to try out experiments... Read more

Phil Factor

9 May 2024

Phil Factor

9 May 2024

Flyway’s Baseline Migrations Explained Simply

A Flyway Baseline migration script is a single script with a B prefix that will migrate an empty database, or one that Flyway has 'cleaned', to the version specified in the file name. It is useful both for consolidating a long, often complex chain of historical migrations, and for capturing the current production version... Read more

Phil Factor

16 April 2024

Phil Factor

16 April 2024

The Flyway Info Command Explained Simply

If you need the current version of your Flyway database, and a history of the changes that were applied to build that version, then the info command is the place to go. It allows you to review applied and pending migrations, track migration status, and troubleshoot any issues that may have occurred during the... Read more

Phil Factor

28 March 2024

Phil Factor

28 March 2024

The Flyway Migrate Command Explained Simply

The 'Migrate' command automates the process of applying the database schema changes that are defined in migration scripts, while Flyway tracks the version of every copy of the database. This makes it much easier to maintain consistency across different database environments, and so facilitates continuous integration, continuous deployment, and database version control practices. Read more

Phil Factor

19 February 2024

Phil Factor

19 February 2024

Using Flyway as a Multi-Database Migration System

Flyway can scale easily to enterprise-scale database systems, even if they involve a mix of relational database systems, are cloud-based, containerized or involve complex authentication. This article demonstrates how we can use Flyway Teams to do a single-batch, multi-database migration, comprising SQL Server, Oracle Cloud, PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite databases. Read more