I’m in the UK today, having arrived this morning in London. Hopefully, by this time ,I’m in Cambridge and at the Redgate office. Maybe sitting in the foyer alcove, playing a little guitar (like I did last Oct).
I’m here for a week of Redgate meetings as we kick off the year and it’s good to see colleagues and friends. All of the advocates are here, including Pat Wright, our newest advocate, and we’re hoping to record a Simple Talks podcast episode this afternoon. Maybe a second one if I can get someone from our data team to come in on a Monday.
Part of this week will be some brainstorming and planning for the year and I’m wondering if there are things you’d like us four advocates (myself, Grant, Kellyn, and Pat) to cover and discuss. Any hot database topics or things you’d want to hear about?
Leave a comment for me if there are things you want to discuss. Otherwise, we’ll have to come up with things that we think might be of interest to you out there.
AI is a big deal in 2026, and at Redgate, we’re experimenting with how AI can help developers and DBAs become better at their jobs. One of the areas we’ve started to add some AI is in Flyway Desktop (FWD), with a few features designed to help reduce the cognitive load and context switches needed while developing code, and help users better understand what changes they’re making in their systems.
I wrote about summaries of migrations scripts last week, which are helpful when you or your colleagues don’t generate good script names, or commit messages. This post looks at another of those changes, which is the generation of the script name.
I’ve been working with Flyway and Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.
Generating Complex Scripts
In Flyway, we call the deployment scripts “migration scripts”, but they are the same thing. These are scripts that are changing, altering, or evolving our database schema in some way. New or altered objects, various schema items, and more.
Our guidance for a lot of customers is to keep the migration scripts simple and easy. That can work, but sometimes we want to put a few things into a script to ensure that we deploy all the changes at once. In the last article, I had this list of changes in one script.
I generated this in the last post with a poor name.
Let’s fix that.
Using the Power of AI
I’m going to delete that script and get my list of objects in the Generate tab. I’ll select a few, as shown below.
Now I’ll generate the script.When the script completes, I see my default “Steve” name for the description. However, look to the right. There’s a looping circle at the far right side of the Description box. I didn’t capture a good image, but it’s actually moving in a circle.
When it completes, I have a better description for my changes.
Let me save this and repeat it for the other changes to the customer tables.
That’s a way better description than I would typically write.
Enabling AI Features in Flyway
This is a preview feature as of Jan 5, 2026 as I write this. To get this in your FWD, your organization needs to have enabled AI features in your portal. I’m just a member, but whoever is an admin for your Redgate products would find it here.
In FWD, you need to look at the Preview Features item under the config menu.
In this area, you can enable or disable features as needed. I see these marked as Red-gate only, but I think they are supposed to be released to some customers by this time. It’s likely I need to upgrade my FWD, which I’ll do when I have time.
Once you do this, you should start seeing some AI stuff with the purple/pink shaded area and the sparkle icon that we’re all seeing everywhere.
Summary
Getting good migration script descriptions, or really any good descriptions, is hard. Developers get tired, they aren’t always creative, they forget things, and they sometimes just take the default.
Witness my repo.
This feature reduces the burden on developers and auto-generates a name for the file. It can be edited and changed, but the dev doesn’t have to.
This feature is documented, but we are likely to enhance and change it a bit, so all feedback is welcome. If your organization doesn’t want you using AI, and you could share some schema from a migration script, I’d be happy to test it for you and see what summary is produced and send it back to you. Ping me on X/LinkedIn/BlueSky if you want.
Flyway is an incredible way of deploying changes from one database to another, and now includes both migration-based and state-based deployments. You get the flexibility you need to control database changes in your environment. If you’ve never used it, give it a try today. It works for SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL and nearly 50 other platforms.
The facing page has this quote: “We admire people who get stuff done. While there’s a place for planning, thinking and process it is better to try – and try well – and fail than not to try at all.”
This is an approach I use in lots of my life. Not always, but I do try to get things done, and make a strong effort in doing so. I ask the kids I coach to do the same. The effort is what matters; it’s more important than the outcome. The outcomes matter, but we can accept mistakes.
This is one of those values I think ought to be more prominently displayed and discussed, in most organizations.
I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.
A customer was testing Redgate Data Modeler and complained that it auto-generated PK names. I had to test and discover if I could make things better, and I could. This post shows how.
I can easily add a new Table to my diagram. I’ll click the New Table icon in the menu.
When I click in the design surface, I get a new table.
On the right, I see the table properties. I’ll need to fill these in.
Let’s change the name and add a few columns to this design. Note that for the first column I checked the PK box. This will be my primary key.
These are fine for now. Let’s now add adjust the PK.
Setting the Primary Key Constraint Name
If I click the three dots next to the PK check, I get a lot of properties for the column, not the PK.
I need to go below the columns. Notice the sections below the column area. One of these is for the Primary Key.
If I expand this, I can see the name field and columns. This was blank, but I typed in a name that makes sense to me. I could add columns as well here.
Checking the SQL
If I click the Generate SQL button from the top menu, I get a dialog.
I click the Save button, which will save this to the file specified. I’ve set this in my project before (which is another post), but I am trying to save to a single file for my code that updates.
When I open this code, here is the relevant part of the file. Note that my PK is named appropriately.
What happens if I don’t do that? I added another table, marked a PK, and this is what I see. First, my table (there is nothing set under the PK tab):
The SQL code shows a standard similar to mine, but different. I think a lot of people use the underscores, so I’m not surprised this is the setting.
Not bad, but not what I want.
Summary
The Redgate Data Modeler is a basic tool for now, but it does let you set a specific PK name if you want to enforce a standard. This can’t be set as a default, but I’ve submitted a feature request to change this.
At least I can customize what I want as I build something.
Give Redgate Data Modeler a try and see if it helps you and your team get a handle on your database.
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