In this article, I'll explain why we often need to maintain variants of the same database, at a particular version. I'll demonstrate how useful variants can be for creating slightly modified installations of a database, for special uses, or even for the simple task of provisioning multiple copies of the same version. In doing so, I'll show how we can use Flyway locations to overcome problems that would otherwise require complicated solutions. Flyway can make the whole matter of maintaining database variants very easy. Read more
This article demonstrates a cross-RDBMS way of searching through a set of SQL migration files, in the right order, to get a narrative summary of what changes were made, or will be made, to one or more of the tables or routines within each migration file. Getting these summary reports, even from a set of SQL migrations, isn't difficult, but having a few examples makes it a lot quicker to get started. Read more
If you are using SSDT for authoring, building, debugging, and publishing a database project, how do you change to, or preferably migrate towards, a Flyway-based database development? Flyway doesn't need to replace any code part of SSDT, but if allowed to manage every release candidate, it does allow for much cleaner branching, merging, and deployments. Read more
In an SSDT-Flyway hybrid development, the required database changes may be delivered as a DACPAC, but we get far more control over merge operations and deployments if they are done using Flyway migrations. This article demonstrates how to automate as much as possible of the work required to extract a Flyway-compatible migration script from a DACPAC. Read more
When you are integrating Flyway into an existing SQL Server SSDT development, you don't necessarily have to change everything at once. The development team might continue to use the SSDT tools, but Flyway will soon take over the deployments. This means that any automated processes will need to be able to handle both DACPACs and Flyway migration scripts with equal grace. In this article, I'll demonstrate how to automatically extract a versioned DACPAC from each new Flyway version of a database. Read more
This article uses Flyway and a PowerShell framework to generate a simple JSON model for each new version of an Oracle database, and then compares models to get a high-level 'narrative' of which tables, views or procedures were changed by each Flyway migration. Read more
During development you'll occasionally need an undo script that drops a group of tables, or you might need to truncate a group of tables and then insert fresh data in order to run some tests. Unless you perform the required actions in the correct dependency order, you'll be tripped up by foreign key constraint violations. This article provides a SQL function that returns the list of tables in the correct dependency order. Read more
This article demonstrates one way to do branch-based database development with Flyway, using GitHub to manage the branches and Flyway configuration files to allow Flyway to switch smoothly between databases, when we move between branches in GitHub. Read more
This article provides a simple demonstration of how a small team of developers might set up a Flyway Desktop project to manage, automate, and control database development. Read more
This series of articles describes a path you can take to transforming an existing, manual and error-prone database development and release process into an automated and reliable Database DevOps 'pipeline', starting here with an overview of what we set out to achieve, and the people, processes and tools involved. Read more
