Product articles Team-based Development

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

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

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

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

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