“Some people try to make everything complicated, be the person who tries to make everything simple.”
– Dave Waters

Simplicity is in my blood. That’s not to say I am ‘simple’ in the sense I cannot grasp more than the most basic concepts, but more that I am likely to grasp more complex problems and solutions when they are phrased in simple ways.

This stems from my love of teaching others (on the rare occasion it falls to me to do so), where I find the moment that everything just ‘clicks’ and the realization comes over them to be possibly one of the most satisfying moments one can enjoy in life.

Now recently I’ve been enjoying getting my head around Flyway – an open source JDBC based migrations tool that brings the power of schema versioning and deployments together with the agility that developers need to focus on innovation in Development. There’s something about Flyway that just… ‘clicks’.

It doesn’t really matter what relational database you’re using; MySQL, IBM DB2, even SAP HANA! You can achieve at least the core tenants of database DevOps with this neat and simple little command line tool – there’s not even an installer, you just have to unzip!

Now I’ve had a lot of fun working with Flyway so far and, thanks to a few people (Kendra, Julia – i’m looking at you both!) I have been able to wrap my head around it to, I would say, a fair standard. Caveat on that – being a pure SQL person please don’t ask me about Java based migrations, I’m not quite there yet!! But there is one thing that I kept asking myself:

“When I’m talking to colleagues and customers about Database DevOps, I’m always talking about the benefits of continuous integration; building the database from scratch to ensure that everything builds and validates…” etc. etc. so why haven’t I really come across this with Flyway yet?

Probably for a few reasons. You can include Flyway as a plugin in your Maven and Gradle configurations, so people writing java projects already get that benefit. It can easily form part Flyway itself by virtue is simply small incremental scripts and developers can go backwards and forwards however and as many times as they like with the Flyway Migrate, Undo and Clean commands, so is there really a need for a build? And most importantly, Flyway’s API just allows you to build it in. So naturally you’re building WITH the application.

But naturally when you’re putting your code with other people’s code, things have to be tested and verified, and I like to do this in isolation too – especially for databases that are decoupled from the application, or if you have a number of micro-service style databases you’d want to test all in parallel etc. it’s a great way to shift left. So I started asking myself if there was some way I could implement a CI build using Flyway in Azure DevOps, like I would any of the other database tooling I use on a regular basis? Below you’ll find the product of my tinkering, and a whole heap of help from Julia and Kendra, without whom I would still be figuring out what Baseline does!

Option 1) The simplest option – cmdline

Flyway can be called via the command line and it doesn’t get more simple than that.

You can pass any number of arguments and switches to Flyways command line, including specifying what config files it’s going to be using – which means that all you have to do, is unzip the Flyway components on a dedicated build server (VM or on-prem) and then, after refreshing the migrations available, invoke the command line using Azure DevOps pipelines (or another CI tool) to run Flyway with the commands against a database on the build server (or somewhere accessible to the build server) and Bingo!

And that’s all there is to it! You get to verify that all of the migrations up to the very latest in your VCS will run, and even if you don’t have the VERY base version as a baseline migration, you can still start with a copy of the database – you could even use a Clone for that!

But yes, this does require somewhere for Flyway to exist prior to us running with our migrations… wouldn’t it be even easier if we could do it without even having to unzip Flyway first?

Option 2) Also simple, but very cool! Flyway with Docker

Did you know that Flyway has it’s own docker image? No? Well it does!* Not only that but we can map our own version controlled Migration scripts and Config files to the container so that, if it can point at a database, you sure as heck know it’s going to migrate to it!

*Not sure what the heck all of this Docker/Container stuff is? You’re not alone! Check out this great video on all things containers from The Simple Engineer!

This was the method I tried, and it all started with putting a migration into Version Control. Much like I did for my post on using SQL Change Automation with Azure SQL DB – I set up a repo in Azure DevOps, cloned it down to my local machine and I added a folder for the migrations:

Into this I proceeded to add my base script for creating the DMDatabase (the database I use for EVERYTHING, for which you can find the scripts here):

Once I had included my migration I did the standard

Git add .
Git commit -m "Here is some code"
Git push

and I had a basis from which to work.

Next step then was making sure I had a database to work with. Now the beauty of Flyway means that it can easily support 20+ RDBMS’ so I was like a child at a candy store! I didn’t know what to pick!

For pure ease and again, simplicity, I went for good ol’ SQL Server – or to be precise, I created an Azure SQL Database (at the basic tier too so it’s only costing £3 per month!):

Now here’s where it gets customizable. You don’t NEED to actually even pass in a whole config file to this process. Because the Flyway container is going to spin up everything that would come with an install of Flyway, you can pass it switches to override the default behavior specified in the config file. You can adapt this either by hard-coding strings or by using Environment Variables alongside the native switches – this means you could pass in everything you might need securely through Azure Pipeline’s own methods.

I, on the other hand, was incredibly lazy and decided to use the same config file I use for my Dev environment, but I swapped out the JDBC connection to instead be my Build database:

I think saved this new conf file in my local repo under a folder named Build Configuration – in case I want to add any logic later on to include in the build (like the tSQLt framework and tests! Hint Hint!)

This means that I would only need to specify 2 things as variables, the location of my SQL migrations, and the config file. So the next challenge was getting the docker container up and running, which fortunately it’s very easy to do in Azure Pipelines, here was the entirety of the YAML to run Flyway in a container (and do nothing with it yet):

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

steps:
- task: DockerInstaller@0
  inputs:
    dockerVersion: '17.09.0-ce'
  displayName: 'Install Docker'

- task: Bash@3
  inputs:
    targettype: 'inline'
    script: docker run flyway/flyway -v
  displayName: 'Run Flyway'

So, on any changes to the main branch we’ll be spinning up a Linux VM, grabbing Docker and firing up the Flyway container. That’s it. Simple.

So now I just have to pass in my config file, which is already in my ‘build config’ folder, and my migrations which are in my VCS root. To do this it was a case of mapping where Azure DevOps stores the files from Git during the build to the containers own mount location in which it expects to find the relevant conf and sql files. Fortunately Flyway and Docker have some pretty snazzy and super clear documentation on this – so it was a case of using:

-v [my sql files in vcs]:/flyway/sql

as part of the run – though I had to ensure I also cleaned the build environment first, otherwise it would just be like deploying to a regular database, and we want to make sure we can build from the ground up every single time! This lead to me having the following environment variables:

As, rather helpfully, all of our files from Git are copied to the working directory during the build and we can use the environment variable $(Build.Repository.LocalPath) to grab them! This lead to me updating my YAML to actually do some Flyway running when we spin up the container!

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

steps:
- task: DockerInstaller@0
  inputs:
    dockerVersion: '17.09.0-ce'
  displayName: 'Install Docker'

- task: Bash@3
  inputs:
    targettype: 'inline'
    script: docker run -v $(FLYWAY_LOCATIONS):/flyway/sql -v $(FLYWAY_CONFIG_FILES):/flyway/conf flyway/flyway clean -enterprise
  displayName: 'Clean build schema'

- task: Bash@3
  inputs:
    targettype: 'inline'
    script: docker run -v $(FLYWAY_LOCATIONS):/flyway/sql -v $(FLYWAY_CONFIG_FILES):/flyway/conf flyway/flyway migrate -enterprise
  displayName: 'Run flyway for schema'

Effectively, this will spin up the VM in ADO, download and install Docker, fire up the Flyway container and then 1) clean the target schema (my Azure SQL DB in this case) and 2) then migrate all of the migrations scripts in the repo up to the latest version – and this all seemed to work great!*

*Note: I have an enterprise Flyway licenses which enables loads of great features and support, different version comparisons can be found described here.

So now, whenever I add Flyway SQL migrations to my repo as part of a branch, I can create a PR, merge them back into Trunk and trigger an automatic build against my Flyway build DB in Azure SQL:

Conclusion

Getting up and running with Flyway is so very very easy, anyone can do it – it’s part of the beauty of the technology, but it turns out getting the build up and running too, when you’re not just embedding it directly within your application, is just as straightforward and it was a great learning curve for me!

The best part about this though – is that everything above can be achieved using pretty much any relational database management system you would like, either via the command line and a dedicated build server, or via the Docker container at build time. So get building!