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
With Flyway, you can adopt a test-driven development strategy that will allow you to test and evaluate databases, and database objects, at every phase of the database development lifecycle. The further down the delivery pipeline that bugs appear, the more costly in time and resources they are to fix. This approach will allow you to catch many of them before the database change even gets committed to version control, making a continuous delivery process much easier to adopt and sustain. 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
This article will help you understand the steps to better test data management, when using a migrations-based approach to database development and deployment. It explains the different types of data required and why, the need for separation of DDL and DML code, and the most efficient way to create, load and switch between the different required data sets. 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
An overview of the challenges of database testing and test data management, reviewing the different types of database test that need to run during development work, what sort of test data they require, and how to manage all the required data sets, during development, in a way that allows rapid cycles of parallel testing. 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
Before you commit your Flyway migration files, you may want to run some automated checks for style or 'code smells'. This article demonstrates how to run basic cross-RDBMS code quality checks using SQL Fluff. We analyze the results in PowerShell to produce reports and analytics on the number or types of issues found. 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