Using Database Models and Flyway for Automating Routine Development tasks

Database models have all sorts of useful applications during Flyway development to help us automate those repetitive development tasks that otherwise slow down delivery. This article shows how models can help us automate mundane tasks such as generating a build script for any version of a database or deleting the data from every table. Read more

Tracking Development Changes using Flyway and Database Models

A database model is a standard document that represents the logical design and structure of a database. If we save a model each time Flyway creates a new version of the database, then we can find out what's in each version, and get an overview of how that structure changed between any two versions. This has all sorts of uses in team-based database development work. Read more

Infrequently Asked Questions About Flyway

You can have Flyway up and running in minutes if you're a solo developer managing a single database. However, as you seek to 'scale up' Flyway to accommodate more complex database systems, team-based development, and stricter quality controls, you'll need to tackle some knottier questions. Without adequate answers, tasks such as multi-database management, automation and workflow, and Continuous Integration will be difficult. Hopefully, this article will help. Read more

Maintaining Variants of a Database using Flyway Locations

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

Searching Flyway Migration Files using Grep and Regex

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

Flyway for SQL Server Data Tools Users

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

Flyway and SSDT: Merging Work from a Branch

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

Flyway and SSDT: Extracting a DACPAC from a Flyway-managed Database

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

The Journey to Team-based Development with Flyway

This article explains why Flyway is fundamentally well-suited to the task of bringing control and automation to database development work and then the features of Flyway Teams edition that become necessary when a team of developers need to work concurrently on a database. Read more

Database Branching and Merging without the Tears

Armed with a schema comparison engine and an object-level directory of the source for every recent version of the database, you'll be able to remove a lot of the uncertainty around merging database changes back into development. Read more

Working with Flyway And Entity Framework Code First: An Overview

This article presents an approach to database development and deployment that combines the strengths of Entry Framework Code First for .NET-driven development with the control and database versioning provided by Flyway's SQL migrations. It allows every database change to be reviewed and tested for integrity, performance, and stability in the same way as any application change. It should make a Database CI process much easier to sustain. Read more

How to Automate Cross-Platform Database Development

In order to focus on their primary task of developing databases, the development team need to automate as many as possible of the routine tasks that are essential for database delivery, such as testing, scripting, version control, documentation, code review, reporting and so on. This article gives some advice on how to do it, faced with the added challenge of needing to use several different relational databases. Read more

Recording What’s Changed when Running Oracle Migrations with Flyway

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

Undoing Actions on Groups of Database Tables

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

A Simple Example of Flyway Development using GitHub Branching

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

Setting up for Team-based Database Development using Flyway Desktop

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

Flyway Desktop in Database Development Work: An Overview

For those new to Flyway Desktop, this article takes a strategic overview of the components of a Flyway Desktop project, how to set up a project for team-based development work, and how we can use the tool in conjunction with a version control system and CI servers to manage a database development and release process. Read more

A Real-world Implementation of Database DevOps: People, Processes, Tools

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

Searching a Flyway Database

As a database gets larger, and development more complex, so it becomes increasingly necessary to be able to search for strings in the source files and the database itself. Maybe you need to find when a table first got created, when a foreign key was added, or to find out which tables lack documentation. I'll show you how to answer these sorts of questions by running simple 'wildcard' searches on your Flyway migration files, or source files, as well as more targeted searches on certain parts of your database model. Read more

Increasing the Visibility of Database Changes in Flyway Development

If you save a metadata 'model' for every new version of a database created by Flyway, you can compare the current model to the previous one to see what changed. In turn, you can then generate a database E-R diagram that highlights the changed objects, instantly making those changes visible to other team members. Read more

Cross-RDBMS Version Checks in Flyway

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

Simple Reporting with Flyway and Database Models

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 and Simple Source Control

How to integrate Flyway database development with Source control, so that you can track what changes were made and who made them as well as which objects changed between versions, and how. Read more

Flyway How-tos: a User’s Perspective

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

Database Development Visibility using Flyway and PowerShell

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

What is the Flyway Teamwork Framework?

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

Flyway Gotchas

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

Flyway Branching Walkthrough

We'll step through the process of using Flyway Teams to support database branching and merging, where the team split the development effort into isolated, task-based branches, and each branch has its own development database. Read more

Moving to Team-Based Database Development with Flyway

Describing a route from a basic, 'managed' system of database development to use of branching and merging and CI, using Flyway. By taking these steps, you'll reduce development conflicts, lift testing restrictions, and the organization will have much more flexibility on the release of features and bugfixes. Read more

Moving from ‘Chaotic’ to ‘Managed’ Database Development using Flyway

This article describes a route to adopting Flyway in order to bring management and control to a chaotic database development process. It is based on use of Flyway migrations to update a database from version to version, while maintaining object-level source scripts for tracking changes between versions. Read more

Reporting on the Progress of a Flyway Database Development Project

This article demos a novel way to report on the progress of your Flyway development project. It provides both SQL and PowerShell versions of code that extracts information for each database version from the Flyway schema history table and then plots it in a Gantt chart. Read more

Getting In A State Using Flyway Baseline Migrations

Flyway Teams baseline migration scripts are a simple and fast way to deploy new copies of a database, at a specific version, for testing work, or to create a new branch during development. Read more

Secrets of Flyway Teams Undo

Flyway Teams has an Undo facility that enables you to roll back one or more migrations. This article demonstrates how it works and explains how Undo migrations make testing migration scripts easier and branch-based development simpler. Read more

Discovering What’s Changed by Flyway Migrations

A set of PowerShell cmdlets that will 'diff' two versions of a database and provide a high-level overview of the major database changes made by successive Flyway migrations. You can 'diff' a SQL Server database to the same one on PostgreSQL and find out which objects are the same and which are different. Read more

What is Flyway Enterprise?

How Flyway Enterprise will help you ensure that databases and applications can grow and develop in step, and to implement a workflow for delivery of database changes that is resilient, repeatable, fast and visible. Read more

Branching and Merging in Database Development using Flyway

How to exploit the branching and merging capabilities of Git for scaling up team-based development, when doing Flyway migrations. Read more

Creating Database Build Artifacts when Running Flyway Migrations

This article provides PowerShell automation scripts for running Flyway database migrations. These scripts use SQL Compare to automatically generate all the required database build artifacts in the version control system, for each Flyway deployment. Read more