Paid Flyway Advantages–Undo and Check

Posted on October 31, 2022 by way0utwest

The Community edition of Flyway has some nice basic features, and it works well for many people. However, it requires you to do a lot of the heavy lifting of building and deploying scripts. There are some advantages of the paid editions, and one of those is the Undo and Baseline script additions in Flyway Desktop, which we’ll look at in this post.

This is part of a series of posts that looks at Flyway and the feature differences between editions.

Flyway Desktop

The GUI for Flyway is Flyway Desktop. This works for all editions, though some features are not visible when you aren’t licensed for them. Here is the GUI we see the Flyway Community. Note there really is only one thing, which is a list of migrations.

2022-10-27 17_39_14-Flyway Desktop

This is useful, and it’s certainly nicer than Explorer. Plus, I can see what is run on a particular instance if I add one.

If I look at my Flyway commands, I see this:

2022-10-27 17_43_04-Flyway Desktop

This lets me do the basics of what a script runner does. I can follow a simple, happy path with this functionality.

Teams

Flyway Teams is the mid-tier, and this adds a few nice things. In this case, I now see objects changed in the schema, and I get version control. Both valuable tools. 2022-10-27 17_41_08-Flyway Desktop

However, for the Flyway functionality, I also get Undo and Baseline, both things that I do often.

2022-10-27 17_41_58-Flyway Desktop

The undo is huge, as there are times I need to get rid of something, or fix a script. Hopefully not in production, but definitely in dev and test.

I can also dry run and see the script that will get executed here, something I’ve always wanted to do as a DBA.

Enterprise

The really useful tier is Enterprise. I know it’s pricey, but it also does the things I really need most in a mixed team of different skill levels.

I get the Generate capability, which really automates the things from SQL Compare that hundreds of thousands of you have found valuable.

2022-10-27 17_45_53-Flyway Desktop

I also get the Check command, which lets me look for potential problems.

2022-10-27 17_46_09-Flyway Desktop

They All Work

All tiers work, but the paid versions save you time and handle more of the work for you. If you have a team of gurus, you might like Community, but if your staff could use some help, think about trying the paid editions.

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T-SQL Tuesday #155 Round Up

Posted on October 31, 2022 by way0utwest

It’s time to look back at the 155th blog party. I was the host this month, asking about Dynamic SQL. I got quite a few responses, which I’ve gone through and summarized below. If I’ve missed someone, please ping me.

The Round Up

There are some great posts, so if you are interested in any of these areas, click through and read the original post.

Rob Farley is first, as usual. He’s in Australia, so often he gets to publish close to the start of the day in the world. This month Rob writes about the dangers of dynamic SQL and how you can actually not take values of object names from the user. Instead, use their input to search sys.objects and get the value there.

Vitaly Bruk writes about how single use plans with EF cause issues, and how to solve them.

Richard Swinbank talks about how to use dynamic SQL to generate SQL code from metadata. Something I’ve used quite a bit in the past.

Erik Darling takes time to discuss the datatypes used with dynamic SQL and how you might deal with the requirement for NVARCHAR when building the string.

Ajay Dwivendi has a method for gathering SQL Server health metrics using dynamic SQL.

Aaron Bertrand gets a post in, despite being on vacation. He writes about ow you might use dynamic SQL to execute code across all databases.

Brent Ozar adds comments to Dynamic SQL. He suggest you should as well.

Oliver Van Steenlandt writes about a couple of cases. Managing different levels of aggregates and for building ETL scripts.

Raul Gonzalez reminds us of the security issues with dynamic SQL and SQL Injection.

Reitse Eskins has a lot of schemas and uses dynamic SQL to build GRANT scripts.

Shane O’Neill shows a few Dynamic SQL tricks to make it easier to debug.

Gerard Jaryczewski is new to the T-SQL Tuesday party, but skips in with a solution to a nightmare for a SQL developer.

Josh Smith gives us a three act play that is amusing to read.

Nigel Foulkes-Nock takes a moment to examine the foreach db procedure.

Kevin Martin writes about a search procedure you don’t have to write, because it’s generated.

Ken Fisher notes that if we generate code, we need to generate comments as well.

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A Scary Situation

Posted on October 31, 2022 by way0utwest

Today is Halloween, a holiday of costumes, candy, and scary movies. My family has enjoyed scary movies over the years, though not necessarily on this date. However, the theme has me thinking about the scary situations that you’ve encountered, or maybe those that worry you in your job.

I don’t worry about too many scary things in my job. I do get some anxiety before some presentations, and there are times I’ve been nervous before recordings, but it’s helpful for me to remember that none of these things are likely to be remembered for long if I do make a mistake. There’s just so much content produced every week.

That thought didn’t help me years ago when I gave a keynote at the Rocky Mountain Tech Trifecta. Most of the 600 people in the audience didn’t bother me, but my wife was there to see me for the first time and that was scary. I had to talk to myself before I went on, reminding myself to relax and just deliver the talk I’d prepared. Fortunately, I didn’t mess it up and she enjoyed it.

As a developer, I haven’t been too scared when writing or deploying code. I came into this business watching so many bugs get thrown over the wall and deployed that I rarely worried something I submitted would have bugs. I knew there would be bugs in some code, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. Others would have reviewed my code and when a bug report came back, I’d just write new code that solved that bug (and hopefully didn’t introduce others).

As a DBA, the scariest times are when you actually have to restore a database that matters. I’ve had CEOs, VPs, CTOs, and plenty of managers in between staring over my shoulder, asking questions or commenting on the importance of the act. When you’re bringing back a database with a bunch of log files, that creates some pressure and stress. Lucky for me, I’ve been able to perform well in those situations. If I hadn’t, perhaps I’d have never started writing or built SQL Server Central.

What are your scary stories today? What things make you nervous or create some anxiety? I think the scariest times I’ve had in a few jobs were when companies were reorganizing and looking to lay off a portion of their staff. Those are never good days, and while I usually survived, the stress before knowing that was very scary.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

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Daily Coping 31 Oct 2022

Posted on October 31, 2022 by way0utwest

Today’s coping tip is to find a new perspective on a problem you face.

I don’t face many big problems, but I do face lots of small ones on a regular basis. One thing I’m struggling with is how to keep up with some of the changes in our products at work. They are sometimes rev’ing so fast, and a good portion of my work is non-Redgate stuff, so I’m falling behind a bit.

It’s easy to complain and try to work harder, but those aren’t good solutions. Instead, someone suggested to me that I break down the changes into groups of time, rather than thinking of them as a stream. Don’t try to keep up every week or even every month.

Instead, look at all the changes in a couple months for one product. Spend a few times in a week reading and practicing. Then take another thing the next week (or two) and repeat. I’ll always be a bit behind, but that’s not a bad perspective to talk. I will try this for a bit.

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQL Server Central newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

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