Describing the two main use cases for occasional "cherry picking" of Flyway database migration scripts: back-filling emergency production hotfixes to version control and managing parallel development streams. Read more
How to send Flyway logging and error output to JSON and consume it in PowerShell to produce ad-hoc database migrations reports, including any errors that occurred, the version of the database, runtimes for each migration script and more. Read more
A SQL Server query is suddenly running slowly, for no obvious reason. Grant Fritchey shares a 5-point plan to help you track down the cause and fix the problem. Read more
You need a fast, general-purpose way to save the results of a query or batch or procedure into any sort of worktable, such as a temporary table or a table variable or table valued parameter. A simple SELECT…INTO isn't versatile enough for these requirements, and the alternative ways to handcraft the list of columns are slow and error prone. Phil Factor shows how to create a 'table-build generator' that will do all this, and save you a lot of time, especially if you use a lot of working tables in your code. Read more
There are certain checks that need to be done after a database migration is complete. One good example of this is the check that a migration script, such as one that merges changes from a branch into main, doesn't cause 'invalid objects' (a.k.a. 'missing references') in your databases. I'll show you how to run this check, using sp_RefreshSQLModule, and incorporate it into a Flyway "after" migration script. Read more
Phil Factor explains the uses and limitations of native SSMS templates and snippets, and then demonstrates the extra versatility that SQL Prompt snippets provide. Read more
Dave Poole explains the need for high quality database documentation and then demonstrates how to document the SQL Server database for a data catalog, in both HTML and Git Markdown, using SQL Doc, SQL Data Catalog, PowerShell, and a few helper scripts to ensure consistency and correctness. Read more
Every time you need to reuse the query results from SSMS, for example to populate another table, or to search for matching rows in another table, it will inevitably mean a lot of manual tweaking to the get the results into the right format. Louis Davidson uncovers three SQL Prompt gems that can remove all this pain. Read more
Phil Factor demonstrates why we occasionally need to 'baseline' a database, when automating database deployments with Flyway, and a simple way of reducing the number of migration files that are required for a build. Read more
This article provides SQL "bulk copy" routines to extract data from and load it into a SQL Server database, rapidly, and demonstrates a way to automatically bulk insert the test data in a Flyway build, using a SQL callback. Read more