Matt Hilbert

20 November 2023

Why every user can now fly first class with Flyway

Flyway v10 has arrived, bringing with it some major advantages for Community users, open source contributors and developers everywhere. The big news? Every user can now download the latest, most secure version of Flyway, however old their database, and Redgate is affirming its commitment to open source to make it easier to accept and manage community updates.

Let’s talk security

One major concern for Flyway Community users has been support for older database versions in the form of bug fixes and security patches. Like The PostgreSQL Global Development Group, the policy with Flyway Community was to support database engines for five years after their initial release, following which they were considered end-of-life (EOL) and no longer supported.

Users of the paid-for versions, Flyway Teams and Flyway Enterprise, however, continued to receive support, so some users gained an advantage while others didn’t. In a major change, Flyway V10 levels the playing field by introducing database backwards compatibility for Community users. They can now benefit from the latest updates in Flyway V10 while reducing the risk of using older versions of Flyway that include security vulnerabilities that have already been addressed.

Let’s talk open source

Open source has always been at the heart of Flyway and Redgate is now re-affirming its commitment to open source users after some major re-engineering behind the scenes to enable the community to contribute directly to the open source repository with Pull Requests.

The holdup on this development was what the original creator of Flyway, Axel Fontaine, called ‘the OSSifier’. In itself, it was a clever piece of technology that enabled a single repository containing both the closed and open parts of Flyway that were necessary at the time for the free and paid-for tier that had been introduced.

It worked pretty well for a single developer but it started to creak at the seams when Redgate ramped up the development of Flyway with a full team, a stream of releases and an ambitious roadmap. It made it hard to accept community contributions because Pull Requests couldn’t be easily handled. It wasn’t in the spirit of open source.

The solution? Goodbye OSSifier, welcome plug-in architecture. A neat way of making the core Flyway code identical between proprietary and open source, with separate plug-ins for both, and enabling the community to contribute directly with Pull Requests.

One welcome result is separating out database support into different modules as part of the plug-in architecture, and those modules will soon be moved to their own open source repository, so that community members can support their own database of choice.

I like how Flyway lead software engineer, James Johnston, put it when he wrote about The Flyway Engine, OSS (Open-Source Software) and Redgate: “We look forward to being able to quickly add support for the latest and greatest databases thanks to the amazing community we have (I’m looking at you, ClickHouse fans – we see your Pull Requests and you’re first in line once this gets implemented).”

Let’s talk a first class Flyway experience for every user

V10 of every software package deserves to be something special, and it’s no different with Flyway. Its introduction is a major step for every user because it offers more security, more features, and more opportunities to contribute to the open source code behind it.

All known critical and high priority security vulnerabilities have been addressed and Community users now gain support for older databases. The licensing has been simplified and made much easier to use and manage. Support for SingleStoreDB has been introduced, combining Flyway’s seamless schema management with SingleStoreDB’s high-performance distributed SQL database. Google Cloud Spanner is now out of Beta and into full support. NoSQL is coming, with plans to add support for MongoDB, Cassandra and Redis.

Finally, while previous versions of Flyway Community were limited to the API and CLI, Flyway Desktop has now been added to the free edition. So every user can now take advantage of the developer-focused GUI to easily and safely version control database schema and prepare deployments for SQL Server, PostgreSQL and Oracle databases.

• Find out which edition of Flyway will give you, your team or your enterprise the best advantages
• Discover more about Flyway in the accompanying blog post, 10 reasons to choose Flyway