A brief history of the DevOps movement and a discussion of the pivotal role of a tool like Flyway in the DevOps toolchain, when developing and delivering database changes. Read more
How does one check that a database is definitively at the version that Flyway says it is? Or that a test teardown procedure leaves no trace in the database? Or verify that an undo script returns a database's metadata to that state it should be in for the version to which you're rolling back? This article shows how to do high-level version checks, by comparing JSON models. Read more
If you can produce a quick Entity-Relationship diagram for any version of a database, you'll have a simple way to 'sanity check' it for unreferenced tables, missing keys and other design flaws. This article shows how to auto-generate these diagrams when running a migration, using Flyway Teams and PowerShell. Read more
How to get started with Flyway, as simply as possible, using PowerShell. This article provides a practice set of Flyway migration scripts that will build the original pubs database on either SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB or SQLite and then migrate it from version to version, making a series of improvements to its schema design. Read more
If you can generate a file-based (JSON) model for each new version of a database, produced by a Flyway migration, then you have an easy way to run simple reports to help you search, list, and understand the structure of these databases. I'll show how to produce the models using PowerShell and then run some queries against them to generate the reports. Read more
Flyway provides a database-independent way for a team to track, manage and apply database changes, while maintaining strict control of database versions. It updates a database by running a series of versioned migration scripts, in order, and keeps track of all the changes in a special "schema history" table. It sounds simple, but it is easy to derail this team discipline if you don't find the right answers to the following questions… Read more
The payback of DevOps is not simply in automation but in using that automation to increase the visibility of the development processes. This article demonstrates way to make Flyway developments more visible, regardless of your RDBMS, such as by providing a detailed migration history, and change reports that reveal detail of what is going on to all involved. Read more
The FlywayTeamwork PowerShell framework is designed to help get you started quickly with scripting Flyway migrations for a range of database systems. It introduces a PowerShell task library to help with the scripting of repetitive chores and to generate some of the 'build artifacts' that are often required during team development work. This article explains the basics of the framework's design and provides a demo how to use Flyway to migrate a PostgreSQL database, while generating a high-level narrative of the changes made between versions. Read more
Before you get very far with database development and testing, you need to be clear about your strategy for handling data. In this article I'll explain some of these issues in general terms, and then demonstrate how you can navigate these problems easily with Flyway. Read more
Explaining some of the 'gotchas' that can trip up the unwary Flyway user, and how to avoid them. One or two of these you'll encounter quickly, such as the case-sensitivity of parameters and arguments. Others, such as potential problems with undo scripts or running scripted callbacks, only when you are tackling more complex development processes. Read more