After finishing the blog post last week about how to work with Liquibase, I decided to find the answer to one of the outstanding questions I had about the tool, which was whether or not it allows you to put DML statements in your changelogs and changesets. I couldn’t find any documentation anywhere online about putting DMLs in changesets, so I had to figure it out myself. Finding the answer to this was much easier than I thought it would be since all it involved was adding a DML statement to a changelog, running the Liquibase update statement, and then seeing what happened.

So do DMLs work in Liquibase changesets?

Yes, they do. To prove it, I opened the existing changelog file that I created for last week’s tutorial and I added a new changeset.

Then I opened the command prompt for Liquibase and ran the normal update statement to get my database aligned with the changelog file.

The update statement completed successfully, which I truly was not expecting. Then I had to go into the database to see if that DML statement was actually executed on the DB or not, and it was!

I was very excited to see that, because it meant that if my team decided to switch to this tool, we could continue deploying DML scripts alongside any DDL scripts they may be associated with.

Summary

Today’s post is short and sweet. I wanted to see if the Liquibase tool had a key feature I was looking for it to have but couldn’t find documentation about. I was thrilled to see that it does work with DMLs. Such a small but important feature.

In last week’s post, I covered the initial setup steps you must follow when starting to work with Liquibase. In this week’s post, I will be finishing up my tutorial of getting started with Liquibase. If you haven’t yet downloaded and set up Liquibase on your computer, please review that post before reading this one.

What’s in this post:

• Create the baseline changelog file for your database
• Adding and tracking ongoing database changes
  • Method 1: Adding scripts to changelog file
  • Method 2: Making changes in your IDE
• Structuring your changelogs according to best practices
• Outstanding questions
• Summary

Create the baseline changelog file for your database

Using the command “generate-changelog” with the CLI for Liquibase, we can create a SQL file containing queries that will regenerate all objects in your database. What database objects get scripted into this files depends on which license you have for Liquibase. If you have the open-source version of the tool, it will script out all non-programmable objects like tables, keys, etc. If you want or need to script out all of your programmable objects such as procedures and functions (plus other items), you will need to have the Pro version of the tool.

Either way, the command for creating the script is exactly the same.

“liquibase generate-changelog --changelog-file=mydatabase-changelog.sql --overwrite-output-file=true”

Let’s break this command down. The first two words are simple, you’re calling Liquibase and specifying you want it to run the generate-changelog command. The next part is the “changelog-file” argument that allows you to specify the file you want to write the new changelog to. The next argument, “overwrite-output-file” tells the tool if you want to overwrite that specified file if it already exists. In this case, I specified true for that argument because I want the tool to overwrite the example changesets in the file it created upon project creation with the actual queries for my database. After running this command, you should get a success message like the following.

And if you open that specified file now, it should contain the actual scripts to generate all of the objects in your database, each change separated into its own changeset. Each generated changeset will be defined with the username of the person who generated the file, as well as the tracking/version number for the set.

Now you are ready to start doing normal development and changes to your database because you have baselined your project.

Adding and tracking ongoing database changes

There are two methods for adding/tracking database changes with this tool: 1) add your scripts to the changelog file as changesets, then “update” the database with those changes, or 2) make your changes within the IDE for your database (ex: PGAdmin) then use the “generate-changelog” command to identify and script those changes.

Method 1: Adding Scripts to Changelog File

Open your changelog file and add a new line. On that line, you are going to add the required comment that lets Liquibase know you are starting a new changeset. This line looks like “– changeset author:versionNumber”. Example: “– changeset elahren:1.1”. Then, add a line below your changeset comment and add the DDL script you would like to run on your database. Once you have added all the changes you would like to your changelog file, save and close the file, then open the Liquibase command prompt to execute those changes on your database.

If you would like to preview the changes Liquibase will run on your database, you can run the command “liquibase update-sql” which will show you all the SQL that will be executed, which will include your queries as well as queries Liquibase will run to track what you’re applying. In the below screenshot, the commands with a green square are the ones I included in my changesets, and the commands with a blue square are the ones that Liquibase will run to track the changes.

If the preview looks correct, you can then run the command “liquibase update” which will apply all the previously viewed SQL queries to your database. You can verify the changes have been successfully applied by opening your database in your normal IDE (e.g. PGAdmin) and confirm the changes.

Method 2: Make Changes in your IDE

The process for making the changes in your IDE and then tracking those changes in Liquibase is almost exactly the same as the process we used to create the initial changelog file when setting up the project. It is as easy as making whatever database changes you want in your IDE and then opening the Liquibase CLI and running the “generate-changelog” command with either a new file name if you want to put it in a new changelog file, or use the same file name with the “--overwrite-output-file=true” argument.

If you are going to use the first option, writing to a new changelog file, it seems like you will then need to edit the file after creating it to remove any of the queries you didn’t create in your latest changes (since the command will try to recreate all objects in your database).

I’m not sure if this is the recommended workflow for tracking database changes, but it was a feature my team was hoping to get from the database change tracking tools we’ve been investigating, so I found a way to make it happen with Liquibase. If you want or need to have a “database-first” approach to change tracking (making changes directly to the database and then generating files to track that), instead of a “migration-first” type approach (making migration/change scripts and then applying that to your database), it appears that is technically possible with this tool.

Structuring your changelogs according to best practices

You can set up and structure your changelogs in any way that you would like, it’s your project, but Liquibase does have some ideas to help you stay organized. There are two different organization methods they recommend: object-oriented and release-oriented.

Object-oriented means you will create a different changelog file for each object or type of object being tracked in your database (e.g. one file for stored procedure changes, one file for table changes, etc.). I personally don’t like the idea of this organization method since it would mean you could be updating many files each time you make database changes, like if you’re updating procedures, tables, indexes, and views all for one release. However, having all the object types separated could also be a benefit, depending on how you normally complete your work.

Release-oriented means you make a new file for each release you make for your software/database. This method seems more familiar to me personally since it’s similar to the concept of migration scripts in Red-Gate’s SQL Change Automation or Flyway tools, where you can combine multiple database changes you’re making at once into a single file and deploy it all at once. This process could also work for organizations that use a more structured delivery system and not continuous delivery/agile development. That way you could put all of your changes for the week, month, or whatever development length into one file to associate with one particular release.

Whichever method you choose should work well if you set it up properly, the decision of which option to choose only depends on how you work and how you prefer to track that work.

Outstanding Questions

The first outstanding question I have about this tool right now is can you put DML scripts in your changelogs? That is something supported by Red-Gate’s SQL Change Automation and Flyway tools, which is what I’m used to. So far, I haven’t been able to figure out if that’s possible with Liquibase. Being able to deploy DML changes alongside a regular deployment really simplifies the process of some DMLs that you may need to run in your production environment, because it makes sure they go out with the deployment they are related to. An example of this is if you are adding a lookup type table (i.e. AccountTypes) and need to add the few records into that table after it’s created. Normally, you would need to run such a DML script manually after your deployment has completed. But SCA and Flyway allow you to put the DML in a deployable script that will automatically insert that data after the table is created. That of course can come with its own challenges, but it’s something I’ve really enjoyed with Red-Gate SQL Change Automation so I want it to be possible with Liquibase.

The second outstanding question I have about Liquibase is whether or not it can work with a secrets manager for database user passwords. How I set up my test project locally required me to put the password for the database user for Liquibase to be saved in cleartext in the properties file, which is not safe. For my purposes, it was fine since it’s a dummy database that doesn’t have any real data in it. But for production purposes, there is no way we would ever save a database user password in cleartext in a file. I haven’t had the chance to research this question more yet, so I’m not sure if the tool would work with a secrets manager or not.

Summary

When I first started working with Liquibase I was pretty frustrated with it since it was a totally new-to-me tool with documentation I didn’t find intuitive. But I kept working with it because I wanted to make it work for my organization and then just found it interesting to learn more about. I now feel fairly confident working with the tool in the ways my organization would need.

For being a tool with a completely free-to-use version, it seems like it has a good amount of features that many developers might need and could use for tracking and deploying changes to their databases. I can’t honestly say that I would prefer using this tool to Red-Gate’s SQL Change Automation or Flyway tools, which I currently work with, since they have a better use interface and seem to have more intuitive script creation processes. But Liquibase does seem like a useful tool that I could get used to working with given enough time. It’s worth a try to work with if your organization is working with a limited tool budget.

In a recent post, I gave an overview of what Liquibase is and what features it offers as a bare minimum. This week and next, I am going to give the step-by-step instructions I followed myself to learn how to properly set up a Liquibase project after playing with it for several hours. I personally found the documentation offered by Liquibase a little confusing, so this post is essentially the notes I took while figuring out what I really needed to do to set up a demo project with the tool. The aim of this post is not to be an exhaustive tutorial of the software, since I am far from an expert of Liquibase. Let me know in the comments if you found any of this useful or interesting!

What’s in this post:

• Download Liquibase and install it on your computer
• Verify that Liquibase is properly installed on your computer
• Create your first Liquibase project
  • New project files
  • Database changes made with project initialization
• A quick note about changelogs and changesets
• Summary
• What’s in the next post

Download Liquibase and install it on your computer

I won’t provide a link to it here (because that would be sketchy), but you can find the tar or Windows installer download for the free (open-source) version of Liquibase on the Liquibase website under Editions & Pricing > Open Source. I used the Windows installer version since I am working on a Windows machine. After you download the installer, you can run it to install the tool. I did not change any of the setup options (there were very few). The installation and setup were both extremely fast.

After the installer runs, you should be able to see where it was downloaded, which for me, was under Program Files. Now you can start working from that downloaded folder for the program, or you can copy the entire folder to another directory so you can play around with it without the fear of breaking something and then having to reinstall everything to fix issues. I made a copy in another location and worked from that copy (which was suggested by one of the Liquibase tutorials).

Verify that Liquibase is properly installed on your computer

The next important step is to verify the status of the tool to make sure it installed correctly. To do this, you want to open a command prompt window and navigate to the directory of the liquibase folder that you want to work with, then run the command “liquibase status“.

As you can see in the above screenshot, although I had an error returned by the “status” command (since I haven’t setup a Liquibase project yet), the tool did run and work (as evidenced by the giant Liquibase printout). Download and installation of the tool was successful.

Create your first Liquibase project

Creating your first project is simpler than I originally thought it was. I knew that at a bare minimum, a file called “liquibase.properties” needed to be created, but I thought that I had to do that manually (mostly because I did skip a page or two in the documentation that I thought weren’t needed). Although it is possible to create that file manually and then manually enter the necessary values to create a project, the easiest way to setup a new project and all of its necessary files is to use the “init” command, “liquibase init project“.

That command will run you through the process of setting up a new project, including setting the necessary values for the liquibase.properties file. If you are fine with using all default settings for your project, specify “Y” when prompted, otherwise specify “C” which will allow you to customize the values used by the project so you can work with your own database.

What I specified for each of the setup prompts:

• Use default project settings or custom? Custom, “C“
• Relative path for the new project directory? In the main Liquibase folder, not in a subfolder, “./” (I would likely change this for an actual development project if I was creating one for work)
• Name for the base changelog file? “mydatabase-changelog“, but you can set it to whatever makes the most sense to you. I definitely wouldn’t use that format for an actual work project if we move forward with this.
• Changelog format? “sql” since I am working with a normal SQL database
• Name of default properties file? “liquibase.properties“, the recommended name, but you could change it to something else
• JDBC URL to the project database? “jdbc:postgresql://localhost:5432/postgres“. This points to the database called “postgres” on my local machine, which is a PostgreSQL database so it uses that type of connection string that I specified. Other database engines will have their own connection string format.
• Username to connect to database? “Postgres”, the default user for a new PostgreSQL database, which is what the project should use to interact with the database. You should change this to a better-defined user just for the Liquibase tool.
• Password? The password associated with the specified user. For real-world purposes, I hope we’ll be able to use a secrets manager tool to update that file for deployment purposes so that we don’t have to specify that in clear text in the file.

New Project Files

After you go through all of the above steps, Liquibase will have created several new files for you. I am not sure what most of them are for at this point, but I think some of the other files besides the properties file that were created are used for CI/CD integration (flow files). The properties file I created for my project now looks like this after my project setup:

If you have a license key for the enterprise/Pro version of the software, you can scroll to the bottom of this file and uncomment the line “liquibase.licenseKey:” then add your license key after the colon on that line.

You can also review the default changelog file created by Liquibase if you specified that during project initialization. For me, the file contains some sample changesets that don’t relate to my actual database:

These are the tables in my database for the Liquibase project:

To set up this file to represent your database, we’ll need to use the “generate-changelog” command on the project, and I’ll walk through that in the next post.

Database changes made with project initialization

As you can see from the last screenshot above showing what tables I have in my database, there are two tables called databasechangelog and databasechangeloglock. Those two tables will be created in your project database when you connect Liquibase to the DB because that is how the tool keeps track of what changelogs and changesets have been applied to the database already. You can also prevent some changes from being executed when the changelog is applied, and those changes will be tracked with the “lock” table.

You are now ready to start making changes to your database and tracking those changes with Liquibase!

A quick note about changelogs and changesets

The changelog is the main file (or files) that contain the queries you use to interact with your project database. You can have just one or you can have a series of changelogs, each used for a different part of your database.

Each changelog file contains what Liquibase calls the changeset, which is a single unit of change for your database, like an ALTER TABLE statement or any other DDL statement you can run against a database. A changeset is identified in the changelog file with a comment line which will contain the change’s author and then a change number which can essentially be any number you would like to track the changes. If you use the above steps to have Liquibase create your first changelog file for you, it will create a randomly generated version number for each of the queries listed in the file. This number will determine in what order the changes will be applied.

Summary

In this post, I covered how you go about setting up your first Liquibase project and what each of commands and files related to that means. This tool is surprisingly simple to work with, as can be seen with the initial setup process. Next week, I will be covering what you do now that you have the tool successfully installed and set up on your computer.

What’s in the next post:

• Create the baseline changelog file for your database
• Adding and tracking ongoing database changes
  • Method 1: Adding scripts to changelog file
  • Method 2: Making changes in your IDE
• Structuring your changelogs according to best practices
• Outstanding questions
• Summary