migrate VS Flyway

Go does not natively support the use of migrations, but we could use the ORM that has this functionality, such as GORM which is the most used by the community, but We can use migrations without using an ORM, for this we will use the golang-migrate package.

$ curl -L https://github.com/golang-migrate/migrate/releases/download/$version/migrate.$os-$arch.tar.gz | tar xvz

Golang-migrate is a database migration tool designed for Go applications. It helps manage and apply changes to the database schema as the application grows, ensuring that the code and database structure stay in sync.

First of all, thank you for SQLAlchemy! If I ever had to make a final choice in how I would interact with a database for a very large project that involves a considerable dev team, I would always bet on SQLAlchemy. Not that I would necessarily like all aspects of it, but when it comes to Python and SQL - “Nobody ever got fired for picking SQLAlchemy.”.

With that out of the way, despite ORMs doing much more than "just writing SQL", it is exactly on that point that I flinch: Most devs should be exposed to SQL. And if your project allows you to build around simple enough abstractions so that you aren't reinventing the wheel, you should definitely be writing SQL. Especially if you don't know SQL yet - which is the growing case of new devs coming into the job market.

You can achieve a lot with SQlAlchemy Core, a tool that I absolutely recommend, but my post is just a simple alternative to get developers to think about their approach. If that results in some devs reconsidering using "full fat" SQLAlchemy and to try SQLAlchemy Core, that's a win for me!

Your gist tries to highlight the difficulty of doing certain things without an ORM. Migrations (as just 1 example) doesn't need to be hard, simple tools like flyway, or migrate (https://github.com/golang-migrate/migrate) achieve a similar result (while also keeping you on the path of writing SQL!). Deep and complex relationships between objects also don't need to be hard - typically people approach this subject with a requirement to be very flexible in the way they want to build queries and objects, but that to me in a sign that maybe they should reconsider their business logic AND reconsider that, just maybe, their project doesn't require all that flexibility, it is fairly straightforward to extend objects and introduce some more complex representations as and when it is needed - will all of this make me write code faster? Absolutely not. That is why you have spent so much time perfecting SQLAlchemy, but then again, I am not advocating for devs to go and replace their usage of ORMs, just presenting an alternative that may or may not fit their needs for a new project + give devs the chance to learn something that the ORM might have taken away.

Doing this now with a mysql db for my use case. Using sp to take a large chunk of data migration load off my data layer code. I am using migrate (go library) for migrations and hooked it up with a bunch of test suites for all SP and Triggers it creates. I test it against a testDB maintained as part of my CI/CD. Haven’t had an issue with production yet. It does however require quite a bit of initial setup.

Before we can start using MySQL we need to create a table to store our data. I will be using excellent migrate database migrations tool, it can also be imported as a libraray.

We need a database table to store our application's users' data. To generate and migrate a schema, we'll use golang migrate. Kindly follow these instructions to install it on your Operating system. To create a pair of migration files (up and down) for our user table, issue the following command in your terminal and at the root of your project:

Also RedGate, but Flyway has some reasons to recommend it over RedGate Deploy depending on your DBAs/workflows: https://flywaydb.org/

(Though I don't think it is "complete" or "perfect", either.)

EF Migrations are in a really good place now if you like/don't mind C# as a language (and you can easily embed SQL inside the C#, too, but there are benefits to being able to also run high level C# code). With today's tooling you can package your migration "runner application" as a single deployable executable for most platforms. You can build the executable once and run it in all your environments. (The same tool that updates your QA and Staging updates your Prod, testably running the same migrations.) Given the single executable deployable I might even consider using it for projects not themselves written in C#.

There is a bit of tooling needed but is already around. For Java for example I had very good experience with a combination of flyway [1] for migrations, testcontainers [2] for making integration tests as easy as unit tests and querydsl [3] for a query and mapping layer.

[1] https://github.com/flyway/flyway

[2] https://java.testcontainers.org/modules/databases/postgres/

[3] https://github.com/querydsl/querydsl

When software starts using a database, it's advisable to have version control, just as we have Github to control our source code. This is all to be sure about what was executed for that specific version. For Java and Spring boot, we have the Flyway framework that aims to resolve this situation, free of charge.

If you're looking for tools, like https://www.liquibase.com/ or https://flywaydb.org/, which are database-state-based schema migration toolkits - it might be relatively straightforward to build similar ones using Databricks SQL drivers.

Honestly I kind of wish there was a Lukas Eder database migration library. Call it whatever jooq-migration. At least I would have more insight of what is going on (<-- seriously look at the commit history).

This is a 4th option, which should play nice with ArgoCD. The following example runs flyway as a k8s job. The desired migration changes are recorded as files within the chart. This helm chart can be integrated with your application (Using hooks to determine when the migration job is run) or run manually.

By using an opinionated framework within the app/service (like Flyway, Migrate, Diesel, etc). Schema migrations happen on app/service start-up.

Depending on the language or platform there are libraries you can use to manage this, such as Prisma on node and Flyway for Java/JVM.

It's probably overkill but I've used github plus flyway at a couple places in the past which is pretty nice tool for tracking changes to a variety of db's, it's also very helpful if you ever need to replicate a db in a new region/environment.

Flyway