Product articles

Simpler Enterprise Test Data Management using Database Instance Provisioning

Business applications are rarely self-contained, often depending on multiple interconnected databases, each playing a vital role in the functioning of the system. How can we create, refresh, and maintain test data for these complex database systems, and still support dedicated databases and test-driven development processes? This article explains how database instance provisioning helps meet this challenge. Read more

Data Masking in Practice

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

Flyway’s Clean Command Explained Simply

The Clean command resets a database to its initial state, before any Flyway migrations were applied. In other words, it empties the database. This can be useful for any development task that requires that you recreate the database structure, or for tearing down a test harness. It also allows you to try out experiments and alternative strategies within an isolated feature branch, and then reverse out of them. Read more

Flyway’s Baseline Migrations Explained Simply

A Flyway Baseline migration script is a single script with a B prefix that will migrate an empty database, or one that Flyway has 'cleaned', to the version specified in the file name. It is useful both for consolidating a long, often complex chain of historical migrations, and for capturing the current production version of a database, as the starting point for developing subsequent migrations. Read more