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
This article demonstrates how to use Redgate Test Data Manager to automate the delivery and teardown of data containers (clones) on four different RDBMS platforms, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle and MySQL, for use in Flyway development projects. Read more
Redgate Monitor now offers improved security for monitoring PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS and Aurora DB clusters, as well as for retrieving enhanced metrics from any RDS instance. Read more
This article takes a 'first look' at database cloning in Redgate Test Data Manager, explaining what it does and its advantages in team-based, test-driven database development. It will get you set up with the cloning CLI and then demos the basics of defining and creating images, and then creating and destroying database containers (clones) using PowerShell. Read more
The Validate command aims to ensure that Flyway can reliably reproduce an existing version of a database from the source migration scripts by warning you if files are retrospectively added, removed or altered that would prevent it from doing so. Validation errors are Flyway's warning that "the source for this version has changed". Read more
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
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
The Baseline command is intended to make it easy to turn any preexisting production database into a Flyway database so that, subsequently, versioned migrations can then be applied to it, bringing greater stability and predictability to database deployments. Read more
When processing a query in PostgreSQL that requires more memory than it's configured to allocate, data will be spilled to disk to complete the query operations. This can introduce performance bottlenecks. Redgate Monitor now includes recommendations for PostgreSQL that warn you when a spill occurs and will help you understand why and what you can do to avoid it. Read more
If you need the current version of your Flyway database, and a history of the changes that were applied to build that version, then the info command is the place to go. It allows you to review applied and pending migrations, track migration status, and troubleshoot any issues that may have occurred during the migration process. Read more