Product learning

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

10 March 2023

Phil Factor

10 March 2023

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: SQL History

Mistakes occasionally happen. Sometimes you accidentally close an SSMS query tab without saving it, before realizing it contained an essential bit of code. Occasionally, you make some ill-judged 'refinements' to working code and now just wish you could rewind your tab back in time an hour and forget the whole sorry episode. Now and... Read more

28 February 2023

28 February 2023

Piping, Filtering and Using Flyway Output in PowerShell

Flyway's output is often overwhelmed with verbose messages, most of which we can ignore but some of which provide vital warnings about failed compilations, or useful details about what a migration or callback did. I'll show how to use some pipeline-aware PowerShell functions to filter out and save the bits we want and pass... Read more

Phil Factor

20 February 2023

Phil Factor

20 February 2023

Improving the Quality of your Database Monitoring

Database monitoring should be as simple as possible, and yet still allow the users to drill into sufficient detail to be able to recommend a fix to the problem. The trick is to adopt a layered or 'tiered' approach. Read more

Phil Factor

3 February 2023

Phil Factor

3 February 2023

Recording What’s Changed when Running Oracle Migrations with Flyway

This article uses Flyway and a PowerShell framework to generate a simple JSON model for each new version of an Oracle database, and then compares models to get a high-level 'narrative' of which tables, views or procedures were changed by each Flyway migration. Read more

25 January 2023

25 January 2023

Complex Production Database Deployments and Flyway

This article explains how, by use of schemas and stub interfaces, we can use Flyway to manage the main development work smoothly alongside any changes or additions required to maintain production-only code. It also demonstrates how this mechanism enables Flyway to manage a 'mock' or 'dummy' variant of a production schema, in development, so... Read more

Phil Factor

18 January 2023

Phil Factor

18 January 2023

Undoing Actions on Groups of Database Tables

During development you'll occasionally need an undo script that drops a group of tables, or you might need to truncate a group of tables and then insert fresh data in order to run some tests. Unless you perform the required actions in the correct dependency order, you'll be tripped up by foreign key constraint... Read more

Phil Factor

12 January 2023

Phil Factor

12 January 2023

Getting Started with Flyway Migrations on Oracle

A quick demonstration of using Flyway with Oracle, for those of a nervous disposition. We'll use Flyway to run some migrations on an Oracle Autonomous Database, building the initial version of the database then filling it with development data. Read more

Phil Factor

5 January 2023

Phil Factor

5 January 2023

A Simple Example of Flyway Development using GitHub Branching

This article demonstrates one way to do branch-based database development with Flyway, using GitHub to manage the branches and Flyway configuration files to allow Flyway to switch smoothly between databases, when we move between branches in GitHub. Read more

Phil Factor

22 December 2022

Phil Factor

22 December 2022

Testing Databases: What’s Required?

An overview of the challenges of database testing and test data management, reviewing the different types of database test that need to run during development work, what sort of test data they require, and how to manage all the required data sets, during development, in a way that allows rapid cycles of parallel testing. Read more

Phil Factor

21 December 2022

Phil Factor

21 December 2022

Dealing with Mutually Dependent Databases in Flyway

How to create and manage 'stub' objects, in Flyway migrations, in order to overcome build failures caused by circular, or mutual, dependencies between objects in different databases. The technique should be applicable to any RDBMS. Read more

Redgate Test Data Manager

Flyway

Redgate Monitor

Overview

Test Data Management

Automate

Monitor

Product learning

Posts by

Phil Factor

SQL Prompt Safety Net Features for SSMS: SQL History

Piping, Filtering and Using Flyway Output in PowerShell

Improving the Quality of your Database Monitoring

Recording What’s Changed when Running Oracle Migrations with Flyway

Complex Production Database Deployments and Flyway

Undoing Actions on Groups of Database Tables

Getting Started with Flyway Migrations on Oracle

A Simple Example of Flyway Development using GitHub Branching

Testing Databases: What’s Required?

Dealing with Mutually Dependent Databases in Flyway

Redgate Test Data Manager

Flyway

Redgate Monitor

Overview

Test Data Management

Automate

Monitor

Posts by Phil Factor

Posts by

Phil Factor