Comments on: Java migrations tools

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 07:21:52 +0000

Found a new tool at http://code.google.com/p/bering/ . First look, it looks a bit like DBDeploy.

Also check out this blog: http://exortech.com/blog/2009/02/01/weekly-release-blog-11-zero-downtime-database-deployment/

If using migrations and always keeping backwards compatibility for a while, you can actually test a new version of the application in production before “committing” to it. Intriguing.

By: Anders

Anders — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:26:04 +0000

For Norwegian speaking people check out the following address for some additional views and some good discussion.

http://johannesbrodwall.com/2009/11/24/tips-for-databasemigreringer/

By: Eirik Rosvold Larsen

Eirik Rosvold Larsen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:31:52 +0000

Unfortunately they’re not in a maven repo AFAIK, and also there might be licensing issues. sqldeveloper 1.5 came with an undocumented bat/sh script that does the job, it’s called “sqlcli”

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:30:53 +0000

Cool. That would be a good option for a new Ant task or the deployer. I guess they’re not available in any Maven repo though.

By: Eirik Rosvold Larsen

Eirik Rosvold Larsen — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:25:42 +0000

> When it comes to Sqlplus vs. Ant it was just a question of which operations are available through JDBC.

You can also get most sqlplus operations (such as PL/SQL stored procedures) available through Java with the sqldeveloper jars which comes bundled with sqldeveloper. The small differences between sqlplus and sqldeveloper is also well documented on the oracle web site.

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:28:53 +0000

My reason earlier for not using Ant from the command line was to avoid having the developers as well as host machines install it. Maven was already installed. But that’s really no biggie.

I think the stuff you are saying makes sense. Just a couple of things that would make everything ideal:
* All artifacts for deploy to anything else than local dev is available in central Maven repo. Even with cargo plugin.
* Have separate tasks that lets you create/copy/dump databases easily for everyone.

I think you probably have most of it covered, and as I say it would just make everything ideal.

When it comes to Sqlplus vs. Ant it was just a question of which operations are available through JDBC. When you’re doing some more advanced DB refactorings you might need some of the Sqlplus features. But there’s really no problem using Ant sql until you need the sqlplus stuff. Just make sure none of your developers grinds to a halt because they don’t know what to do when they hit the limit of JDBC operations.

By: Viggo

Viggo — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:18:16 +0000

I’m thinking about the following approach for solving my db-related tasks:
1. In dev-env use c5-db-migration to create migration scripts and to reset/create and migrate a database by utilizing the maven goals.
2. In test/stage/prod/etc run the migration scripts using Ant. The migration scripts will be bundled with the installer which is made by the maven-assembly-plugin.

What do you think? This will give the developer the same tool (=Maven) for
building code (maven-compile-plugin, maven-war-plugin, maven-ear-plugin etc)
database-related tasks (c5-db-migration)
deploying to appserver (maven-cargo-plugin)

while reusing the same migration scripts in all other environments.

Question: You’ve said in another post that you preferred Sqlplus over Ant SQL tasks. Could you tell me more about the reasons for this? Does SqlPlus/Ant SQL tasks have a way to specify the order to run the migration scripts created by c5-db-migration?

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:50:34 +0000

Doesn’t look like it supports Postgres currently, but Ferris (http://tfnico.blogspot.com/) has created a patch a little while back: http://code.google.com/p/dbdeploy/issues/detail?id=26 . It’s tagged for inclusion in 3.0M2 .

By: Viggo

Viggo — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:46:19 +0000

Det ser ikke ut til at DBDeploy støtter postgresql, kan du bekrefte det?

By: Anders

Anders — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:38:20 +0000

If you’re looking for both Ant and Maven support I guess DBDeploy would be the easiest. On the other hand, writing Ant tasks or Maven plugins isn’t that hard. So if any of the other tools has a decent API, writing support for them shouldn’t be very hard. I’d choose the ones that match your needs best and figure out the technical problems after that.

Well, agile-deploy works by using the same Maven artifact from the Maven repository for all environments, so yeah it has to be env neutral. Currently it only supports ZIPed self contained apps. Contributions are very welcome.

One last option you could consider is running the DB upgrade on application startup, which could be a good solution for many.