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
This article demonstrates using PowerShell-based tokenization to compare two SQL migration files. It ignores non-functional changes like comments or formatting and pinpoints the first meaningful change in SQL logic, providing detailed feedback on its location and nature. Read more
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 repair to resume normal migrations. Read more
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, and you’re good to go! Read more
Environment Variables make interactive use of Flyway much easier, and they are essential when developing callback scripts. This article explains the range of configuration details you can provide and how, and demos a PowerShell script to auto-convert the parameter values stored in Flyway .conf files into environment variables. Read more
Database forking allows teams to multi-task, working on different strands of development in parallel. It also allows them to manage several 'variants' of a production database, such as for SaaS applications with client-specific schema requirements. This article explains how Flyway supports and simplifies database forking, via use of Flyway's locations, baseline migrations and by mapping Flyway projects to schemas. Read more
Maintaining a version of a database opens a lot of possibilities, especially if an automated process can easily grab the current version, at runtime. 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 an event log or bug report with the database version. The article describes various ways to get the current Flyway schema version from Flyway, and how to get it using SQL, in SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Read more
This article discusses Flyway's transition from CONF to TOML configuration files. It highlights the advantages of TOML, such as improved readability, flexibility in managing complex database configurations, and support for specifying multiple database environments. It also discusses a few of the differences to be aware of when switching existing Flyway projects to the new config system. Read more
This is the first of two articles to describe the principles and practicalities of masking data in databases. It explains why an organization sometimes needs masked data, the various forms of masked data we can use, the sort of data that needs to be masked, and the potential pitfalls. Read more
This article takes a strategic look at common data masking and anonymization techniques, and the challenges inherent in protecting certain types of sensitive and personal data, while ensuring that it still looks like the real data, and retains its referential integrity, and distribution characteristics. It also explains, briefly, with references, the tools that one can use to mask different types of data and how to provision development and test machines with these 'de-sensitized' databases, or alternatively to produce fake data that looks like the real thing, but in fact is generated randomly. Read more
