Product articles Team-based Development
Using Bash with Flyway
If you're using a Linux-based operating system, Bash is the obvious choice of scripting language for Flyway. This article demos the basics of dealing with credentials in team-based database development, when using 'traditional' flyway.conf files, and how to save and parse the JSON output of Flyway commands, for example to retrieve the current schema version. It provides a full automation example that will allow a team to maintain several copies of a database, one per development branch, from a Flyway project. Read moreUsing ODBC in PowerShell Scripts and Callbacks
Flyway connects to database using JDBC, but when we're automating Flyway with PowerShell, we can't use JDBC directly to get access to the metadata we need to add useful reports and other functionality to Flyway's build and migration processes. This article demonstrates how to get what we need using ODBC from our PowerShell scripts, via a DSN. Read moreUsing 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 moreTracking 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 moreWorking with Flyway and Entity Framework Code First: Automation
This article will demonstrate how to automate a hybrid database change management system that uses Entity Framework Code First for development and Flyway for deployments. We automatically convert C# migrations, produced by EF, to the Flyway format and then use Flyway command line to deploy the migrations and save the 'object-level state' of each new database version, so we can track exactly which objects changed, and how, between versions. Read moreInfrequently 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 moreUsing SSDT and DACPACs with Flyway: a Demonstration
The aim of this article is simply to demonstrate that you can use two DACPAC files, representing the source and target versions of a SQL Server database, to create a migration file that can then be used in Flyway. Read moreMaintaining 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 Flywaylocations 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 moreFlyway 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 moreFlyway 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 moreFlyway 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 moreThe 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 moreDatabase 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 moreWorking 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 moreHow 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 moreRecording 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 moreUndoing 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 moreA 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 moreSetting 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 moreFlyway 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 moreA 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 moreSearching 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 moreIncreasing 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 moreCross-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 moreSimple 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 moreFlyway 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 moreFlyway 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 moreDatabase 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 moreWhat 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 moreFlyway 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 moreFlyway 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 moreMoving 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 moreMoving 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 moreReporting 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 moreGetting 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 moreSecrets 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 moreDiscovering 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 moreWhat 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 moreBranching 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 moreCreating 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 moreRedgate Hub
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