Maintaining a Utilities Schema in a Flyway Project

Whatever development methodology you use, it is useful to have, and independently maintain, a separate schema within a database for utilities. These utilities are database objects that monitor the functioning and operation of the database, but aren't part of the database. This article demonstrates how to manage these utilities from Flyway so that we can maintain and migrate them separately from the database objects. Read more

Reviewing SQL Migration Files Before a Flyway Migration

Your finger is hovering over the 'enter' key to set off the Flyway "migrate" command, but you hesitate. There is a large stack of migration files for this project: don't all these files need to be checked first? Yes, they do, but how? This article demonstrates how, once armed with the file path locations of all the scripts, you can use PowerShell to search them for various purposes such to review them for potentially disruptive changes, or run code quality checks, or to verify documentation standards. Read more

Using SQL Backup in Flyway Development Work

For a development team, SQL Backup provides a simple way to restore development or test databases, if required, while minimizing the tedium of the task of taking, managing, and restoring the backups. We can generate the required backup commands in the GUI and then use them to construct a SQL script that backs up all the required databases. We can even use the backup commands in a beforeMigrate SQL callback, in Flyway, to make sure the current version is safely backed up before we run migration. 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 where you create and test a rollback file, at the same time as the forward migration, and reuse it as a Flyway undo script. Read more