Phil Factor, Author at Redgate

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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.

Finding the Version of a Flyway-managed Database Using SQL

Maintaining a version of a database opens a lot of possibilities, especially if an automated process can easily grab the current version, at runtime, using just SQL. You might, for example, have a routine that is only appropriate after a particular version. It is also very handy to be able to associate entries in... Read more

Rollbacks, Undos and Undonts

Rollback scripts are designed to allow us to recover safely from a failed deployment that leaves the database in an indeterminate state. They must check exactly what needs to be reverted before doing so. If you work with an RDBMS that cannot support transaction DDL rollback they are vital. This article proposes a strategy... Read more

Managing Static Data in Flyway Database Development

If your database application requires 'static data' to function, then the best way to manage that data is using a view based on a derived table. This article demonstrates ways to create these views, depending on your RDBMS's capabilities, and how to build and manage them in development work, using Flyway and PowerShell. Read more

Managing Datasets for Database Development Work using Flyway

A cross-RDBMS way of exporting, deleting and inserting data, for database development work. It is a PowerShell automation technique for Flyway that uses JSON files for data storage. It should help a team maintain datasets between database versions, as well as to switch between the datasets required to support different types of testing. Read more

The Uses of Dependency Information in Database Development

Dependency information will allow you to avoid errors during a database build or tear-down, by ensuring you create or remove objects in the right order. It will also help you to avoid future 'invalid object' errors, because it will allow you to check that no database alterations have introduced broken references, during Flyway migrations. Read more

Performance Testing Databases with Flyway and PowerShell

Performance tests are central to the quality of the database changes we deliver because they ensure that any business process that accesses the database continues to return its results in an acceptable time. When Flyway creates a new version of the database, it is the ideal time to run these performance checks. Read more

Running Unit and Integration Tests during Flyway Migrations

In this article I'll give a practical example of developing a database, with Flyway, in such a way that it is automatically tested with whatever unit tests and integration tests you specify whenever you migrate the branch you're working on to the next version. If a test fails, you can work out why, undo... Read more

Searching a Flyway Database

As a database gets larger, and development more complex, so it becomes increasingly necessary to be able to search for strings in the source files and the database itself. Maybe you need to find when a table first got created, when a foreign key was added, or to find out which tables lack documentation.... Read more

Building a Database with Flyway

Flyway, especially Flyway Teams edition, can be used in several different ways to accommodate a database development that was originally based on builds rather than migrations. This article explores four different ways to use Flyway to build a particular version of a database, from the ground up, using a single migration script. It should... Read more

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Posts by

Phil Factor