Using Flyway to Manage Oracle DB Versions in the Cloud

This is another entry in my series about managing database scripts/schema as part of agile development. In the past I showed how to use simple SQL and Liquibase to manage schema creation/population scripts, and today I’ll show you how to use Flyway.

Flyway is a free open source solution for managing “database migrations” — or basically helping you keep multiple databases in synch by tracking and applying changes to the schema structure and data.

Flyway uses simple SQL scripts — which means you can use DB specific syntax — and tracks their execution in the database through a table it maintains. It is very easy to get started with and only has 6 commands that you need to be familiar with.

The main command is “migrate” which will check your database status, and then run all the newer scripts that have yet to be run on that instance.

Flyway uses a directory structure that contains a sql folder where you’ll host all your SQL scripts. It uses a naming convention (that can be adjusted) where you start the file name with a Version number (V1, V1.1, V2.1) and then two “_” followed by a description — so something like V1__Create_Emp_Table — will show up as “Create Emp Table” when you issue the “info” command to find out what is the status of a database and which scripts have already run. By the way, the info command will also show you which new scripts are pending to be run on a specific database instance.

In the video below I show how to configure and use Flyway, and how to integrate it into an automatic DevOps process leveraging Oracle Developer Cloud Service. (including task tracking, Git version management of the source, and build execution of the scripts).

Flyway can integrate with various build frameworks (ant, maven, gradle etc), but since many DB folks are not familiar with those, I chose to use simple command lines in my demo to invoke Flyway. On my laptop and local MySQL DB I just used the Flyway command line utility. Since Flyway is not installed by default in the DevCS servers, I did a little trick:

Flyway is a Java program, so into my DevCS Git repository I uploaded the Flyway directory along with needed jars for flyway and the JDBC driver. Then I looked at the script for invoking the command line and found out the Java command they used and copied it into a regular shell command in my build:

java -cp lib/flyway-commandline-4.2.0.jar:lib/flyway-core-4.2.0.jar org.flywaydb.commandline.Main info -user=fw -password=$Password -url=jdbc:oracle:thin:@ipaddress:1521/servicename

The $Password refers to a build parameter which is encrypted.

The directory structure and files in my Git are shown in this image:

Originally published at blogs.oracle.com on October 19, 2017.