Similar to <https://dbup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/...

# getting-started

[Nat Elkins]

Similar to https://dbup.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[diesieben07]

If you are on the JVM I'd recommend Flyway: https://flywaydb.org/

[Matteo Mirk]

yes, that or Liquibase

[Nat Elkins]

Looks like what I want, but is it free?

[Matteo Mirk]

it has both free and paid options

[Nat Elkins]

Got it, looks like it can do just fine with the free option, the paid stuff are things like advanced auth and storing migrations in various cloud storage providers.

[diesieben07]

Yes, I've never needed anything beyond the free version

[Nat Elkins]

Is it something you run as part of your deploy step?

[Nat Elkins]

That's basically what I'm looking for

[diesieben07]

You can either do that (run it standalone using the flyway CLI), or you can just add it as a maven dependency and call it programmatically from within your application before starting up

[Nat Elkins]

Thanks. Do you have any opinion on Liquibase vs Flyway?

[diesieben07]

I haven't used Liquibase. Looking at it, Liquibase requires you to write XML and... yeah no thank you. With Flyway you just write the SQL to perform the necessary changes.

[diesieben07]

Ah, no, Liquibase has SQL, too. Then I can't really comment 😄

[Alex Nordlund]

Liquibase is my favourite

[Alex Nordlund]

also you can write yaml, json, xml, or sql

[nanodeath]

+1 for LiquiBase. the XML really isn't that bad, and yeah you do have to (get to?) write SQL sometimes...some of the more advanced features (triggers) are only covered in the pro version, but writing your own SQL is an easy workaround.

[Nat Elkins]

I prefer writing SQL actually, I've found in general getting as close to the SQL as possible makes debugging so much easier down the road.

[nanodeath]

fair point -- so with LiquiBase you can run the "update" target and it just connects and executes the code, but if you run "updateSQL" it spits out all the SQL it will execute. I review this and copy-paste this into my code reviews, so we know exactly what it's doing

[nanodeath]

and, there's a futureRollbackSQL command that emits the SQL needed to rollback the change if/when it goes live. I also include that in the code review, so that worst case we can panic and easily find the SQL we need to run directly

[Mattia Tommasone]

i have been using liquibase for more than a year and also contributed some code to it. this being said, i don’t think it’s really kotlin-friendly for one main reason: it does not support adding a non-nullable column to a table in a single changeset, which means that you have to add properties in two steps if they are meant to be not nullable:
• add them as nullable --> deploy
• remove the ? to make them non-nullable --> another deployment

[Mattia Tommasone]

apart from this, it works pretty well in my environment, we run the changelog generation inside gradle builds and apply the changes upon production deployments, it’s (almost) entirely transparent to us