Flyway has several ways of allowing you to make mistakes, or even experiment wildly, and then tidy up afterwards easily. In this article, I'll describe a few ways to persuade Flyway that you know what you're doing and that it needn't ignore a migration file. Read more
This article explains the different ways to reverse or accelerate your way out of the problems caused by a failed database deployment, where a technique such as feature flags fits into your strategy, and how Flyway is designed to help you ensure both that you're fully prepared to take swift remedial measures, and that you minimize the need to use them. Read more
Consider a customer who needs to deploy sequence objects to multiple SQL Server production databases, but where the values generated for the surrogate key, in each database, must be unique. This article demonstrates one way that this can be accomplished with Flyway. Read more
Once a scripted Flyway task is tested and bedded-in, it should rarely cause errors, so when one happens the team need to be notified immediately, especially if it is part of an automated deployment process. This article provides a PowerShell cmdlet that will execute any Flyway command, process and filter the Flyway output and send any errors to the chosen notification system. You can receive the Flyway error alerts on your mobile phone, if required! Read more
Any reliable DevOps deployment process must not only deliver the right database code but also ensure that the correct conditions exist for the deployment to succeed. For PostgreSQL databases, this includes ensuring that any extensions on which the database code relies are installed, and at the correct version. Fortunately, Flyway will automatically track which extensions are installed on a database and at what version, so we can 'propagate' these changes accurately during deployments and avoid inconsistencies in database behavior and even application breakages. Read more
This article outlines the syntax of the three and four dot references that usually denote external database references, demonstrates how to find them either from a live database or by using a text search of a script, and explains some of the complicating factors that can lead to 'false positives'. Read more
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 the results along in a form that is useful to the next process in the pipeline. Read more
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
How to tackle database development in Flyway when databases make cross-server references. The technique uses synonyms to represent the remote objects, and local 'stub' objects to overcome the problems caused by 'missing references' when building the individual objects. Read more
When you are building or migrating a database, it is nice to have a system that you can easily configure for various tasks, such as logging, loading or dumping data, or backing up of the database. This article demonstrates how we can use a Flyway placeholder as a simple on/off switch for each task, during Flyway migrations. Read more