Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers. Liquibase value proposition: Liquibase speeds up the development…
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Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Redgate's SQL Toolbelt Essentials includes industry-standard tools for SQL Server development & deployment, enabling users to include SQL Server databases in agile processes and enabilng developers to embed robust and scalable development practices.
Any Codebase that does schema or table changes all the time for development or where Development and code is mostly in the database or SQL liquibase is a must. In a codebase where the database is pretty static or is just a place to dump data, liquibase is probably too much. You also need to have a team for it to really make sense. Doing a solo or small team project doing full version control on the database is probably more overhead than it is worth.
We use SQL Compare to troubleshoot performance problems quite a bit since our data model is more like a template and not everything is 100% in sync and customization occurs between different client databases. We continually get pulled into performance issues and the developers will say Client A is performing different than Client B, why? Using SQL Compare, we usually find that one client was tuned and had indexes altered or added that weren't deployed to all clients or other objects weren't deployed correctly during the release. On the other hand, since our data model practices allow client databases to drift I tried to create a new golden image by trying to compare multiple databases based on the same data model and found it to be a very difficult process to complete using SQL Compare. SQL Compare gave me too much information and doesn't allow enough filtering to eliminate a lot of the noise.
Simple and easy comparison of database schemas and data. Differences can be copied or synced from one database to another with a click of a button.
You can save "projects" so that you can easily rerun a previous comparison whenever you need to.
It has a very simple, easy to learn interface. I've never needed to read any documentation or watch any tutorials in order to figure out how to do something.
Reducing Compatibility issues, when we upgraded Liquibase from 4.2 to 4.9. The same changeset which we were able to run on successfully using 4.2, part of it was now failing when tried to deploy using 4.9
We are not able to see detailed logs (for different changes) in uDeploy when deploying changes through Liquibase
Liquibase should rollback the if any one of the changes fails.
Pricing.... I wish there was an inexpensive developer version I could buy for myself.
Portability.... I would like to use it from a flash drive so I can use it where ever I am asked to work.
Unbundled.... This may be available already but I dont' recall I can buy it cheaply as a stand-alone product. Its only part of the bundle - cost effectively.
We are and will continue using Liquibase and it has become an integral part of our portfolio offering, any new product is by default adopting Liquibase stack.
Liquibase's customer support team has been very instrumental in helping us drive the whole Database CI/CD initiative. We have always received very quick resolution to our queries or any roadblock we hit. Right from setting up Liquibase in our environment to this date the Liquibase team has always helped us deliver quality and innovative solutions.
In my previous project and organization I have used Flyway for database change management and version control similar to Liquibase which I am currently using. Comparing it with Flyway, Liquibase provides more feature flexibility and enhancements to handle complex workflows with rollback capability and its usage of contexts and labels allow us to target changes to specific environments, which Flyway doesn’t support natively. Also Liquibase provides way to compare different schema and generate changelogs for syncing environments automatically where in it allows to have declarative schema management by using XML/YAML/SQL script format.
I've used Visual Studio Database Projects for this type of work in the past with some success, but Redgate SQL Compare is faster, more transparent, and simply easier to use. Faster is self explanatory. More transparent, means that it's much easier to set up your desired options for schema change deployment scripts. Easier to use, It's really dead simple. Start a project, connect your source, connect destination, click compare.
We are still in the early phases, where the costs are potentially greater than the benefit. Trying to get Liquibase integrated into a pipeline has taken time investment and required some trial and error.
We are still a relatively small shop with a relatively small number of schema changes (perhaps 1 every week or so). As such, we aren't at a place where we couldn't have managed control of this without a tool. However, there is no doubt that investing in a tool at this stage was the right move. Now we have established guidelines and a pattern for how to do schema changes in a way that will make things easily scalable as we continue to grow.
