Every development team has its own coding standards. While Flyway provides built-in rules focused on security and data protection, teams quickly find they need additional checks to maintain SQL code quality and consistency across their projects. This article will walk through the ways of defining and testing custom rules, provides a starter pack of custom rules for common code smells, and then explains how to manage your rules efficiently as your rule library grows. Read more
Before you apply pending SQL migration scripts, Flyway can automatically check them for a range of code smells. The check -code command can perform a static code analysis on these scripts to check that they comply with a set of rules designed to encourage good coding practices. You can opt to use SQL Fluff, provide your own Regex rules, or use both. This article explains how Flyway's regex-based code checks work and how to start running checks on Flyway-managed databases. Read more
Extracting and importing data for development and testing is made trickier due to issues such as constraints, dependencies, and special data types. This article introduces a cross-RDBMS solution with JSON for data storage and PowerShell cmdlets that use ODBC to help automate extraction and import, and JSON Schema for validation. Just provide a DSN, and you’re good to go! Read more
A database assertion test aims to check that data within a relational database conforms to specific business rules. This article demonstrates how to run these assertion tests automatically in Flyway, checking that the queries under test always produce the expected results. Read more
How to run structured Arrange-Asset-Act-Teardown (AAAT) tests, each time Flyway successfully migrates a database, where you can annotate each test script to specify exactly how the test run should proceed, and then save all results and any errors to a simple ASCII report. Read more
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
We all love having documentation in source code, if not writing it. We just want to ensure that it gets propagated and retained so you and your team members can read it if they need to. This article demonstrates a cross-RDBMS PowerShell task that will extract the comments from a primary JSON source of database documentation and add it to a set of SQL DDL source files. Read more
Your finger is hovering over the 'enter' key to set off the Flyway "migrate" command, but you hesitate. There is a large stack of migration files for this project: don't all these files need to be checked first? Yes, they do, but how? This article demonstrates how, once armed with the file path locations of all the scripts, you can use PowerShell to search them for various purposes such to review them for potentially disruptive changes, or run code quality checks, or to verify documentation standards. Read more
Sometimes we want to check whether it is possible to run a Flyway migration without error, but not actually make the changes. We might just need to 'sanity test' the performance of a migration on the Staging server, for example. By using a placeholder 'switch' to trigger a SQL Exception, we can get Flyway to roll-back its transaction, and therefore the migration, on demand. Read more
A cross-RDBMS way of exporting, deleting and inserting data, for database development work. It is a PowerShell automation technique for Flyway that uses JSON files for data storage. It should help a team maintain datasets between database versions, as well as to switch between the datasets required to support different types of testing. Read more