Simple SQL Change Management

I’ve been thinking a lot about SQL change management. I know I have written about this before. But I was never satisfied with that idea, mostly because it required managing database changes in two separate but interdependent ways. Blargh. So for my Perl projects the last couple of years, I have stuck to the very simple but ugly Rails-style migration model, as implemented in Module::Build::DB.

But it has been on my brain more lately because I’m writing more and more database applications at work, and managing changes over time is becoming increasingly annoying. I’ve been using a variation on Depesz’s Versioning package, mainly because its idea of specifying dependencies instead of ordered deployment scripts is so useful. However, its implementation in pure SQL, with accompanying shell and Perl scripts, is not entirely satisfying. Worse, one cannot easily include the contents of an earlier deployment script in a reversion script, because the dependency registration function embedded in a script will throw an error if it has been run before. The upshot is that if you make a one-line change to a database function, you still have to paste the entire thing into a new file and commit it to your source code repository. This makes tracking diffs annoying.

Oh, and did I mention that there is no simple built-in way to revert changes, and even if there were, because there are no named releases, it can be difficult to decide what to revert to? I don’t often need that capability, but when I need it, I need it.

Then, this week, Robert Haas described a deployment implementation he implemented. It was simple:

My last implementation worked by keeping a schema_versions table on the server with one column, a UUID. The deployment tarball contained a file with a list of UUIDs in it, each one associated to an SQL script. At install time, the install script ran through that file in order and ran any scripts whose UUID didn’t yet appear in the table, and then added the UUIDs of the run scripts to the table.

I like this simplicity, but there are some more things I think could be done, including dependency reslolution and reversion. And it seems silly to have a UUID stand for a script name; why not just list script names? Better yet, tag groups of changes for easy reference.

Yet Another SQL Deployment Strategy

So here’s my proposal. Following Robert, we create a configuration file, but instead of just listing changes, we fill it with tags and the names of the changes are associated with each. An example:

[alpha]
users_table

[beta]
add_widget
widgets_table

[gamma]
add_user

Our change management app will parse this file, finding the tag for each stage of the migration in brackets, and apply the associated changes, simply finding each of them in sql/deploy/$change.sql. If it’s reverting changes, it finds the reversion scripts named sql/revert/$change.sql. The tags can be anything you want; release tags might be useful. Easy so far, right?

Except notice that I have a minor ordering problem here. The add_widget change, which adds a function to insert a record into the widgets table, comes before the widgets_table script. If we run the add_widget change first, it will fail, because the widgets table does not yet exist.

Of course we can re-order the lines in the configuration file. But given that one might have many changes for a particular tag, with many cross-referenceing dependencies, I think it’s better to overcome this problem in the scripts themselves. So I suggest that the sql/deploy/add_widget.sql file look something like this:

-- requires: widgets_table

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION add_widget(
    username   TEXT,
    widgetname TEXT
) RETURNS VOID LANGUAGE SQL AS $$
    INSERT INTO widgets (created_by, name) VALUES ($1, $2);
$$;

Here I’m stealing Depesz’s dependency tracking idea. With a simple comment at the top of the script, we specify that this change requires that the widgets_table change be run first. So let’s look at sql/deploy/widgets_table.sql:

-- requires: users_table

CREATE TABLE widgets (
    created_by TEXT NOT NULL REFERENCES users(name),
    name       TEXT NOT NULL
);

Ah, now here we also require that the users_table change be deployed first. Of course, it likely would be, given that it appears under a tag earlier in the file, but it’s best to be safe and explicitly spell out dependencies. Someone might merge the two tags at some point before release, right?

The users_table change has no dependencies, but the later add_user change of course does; our sql/deploy/add_user.sql:

-- requires: users_table

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION add_user(
    name TEXT
) RETURNS VOID LANGUAGE SQL AS $$
    INSERT INTO users (name) VALUES ($1);
$$;

Our deployment app can properly resolve these dependencies. Of course, we also need reversion scripts in the sql/revert directory. They might look something like:

-- sql/revert/users_table.sql
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS users;

-- sql/revert/add_widget.sql
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS add_widget(text, text);

-- sql/revert/widgets_table.sql
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS widgets;

-- sql/revert/add_user.sql
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS add_user(text);

So far so good, right? Our app can resolve dependencies in both directions, so that if we tell it to revert to beta, it can do so in the proper order.

Now, as the deployment app runs the scripts, deploying or reverting changes, it tracks them and their dependencies in its own metadata table in the database, not unlike Depesz’s Versioning package. But because dependencies are parsed from comments in the scripts, we are free to include the contents of one script in another. For example, say that we later need to revise the add_widget() function to log the time a widget is created. First we add a new script to add the necessary column:

-- requires: widgets_table
ALTER TABLE widgets ADD created_at TIMESTAMPTZ;

Call that script sql/deploy/widgets_created_at.sql. Next we add a script that changes add_widgets():

-- requires widgets_created_at
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION add_widget(
    username   TEXT,
    widgetname TEXT
) RETURNS VOID LANGUAGE SQL AS $$
    INSERT INTO widgets (created_by, name, created_at)
    VALUES ($1, $2, NOW());
$$;

Call it sql/deploy/add_widget_v2.sql. Then update the deployment configuration file with a new tag and the associated changes:

[delta]
widgets_created_at
add_widget_v2

With me so far? Now, what about reversion? sql/revert/widgets_created_at.sql is simple, of course:

ALTER TABLE widgets DROP COLUMN IF EXISTS created_at;

But what should sql/revert/add_widget_v2.sql look like? Why, to go back to the first version of add_widget(), it would be identical to sql/deploy/add_widget.sql. But it would be silly to copy the whole file, wouldn’t it? Why duplicate when we can just include?

\i sql/deploy/add_widget.sql

Boom, we get the reversion script for free. No unnecessary duplication between deployment and reversion scripts, and all dependencies are nicely resolved. Plus, the tags in the configuration file make it easy to deploy and revert change sets as necessary, with dependencies properly followed.

There’s More!

To recap, I had two primary challenges with Depesz’s Versioning package to overcome: inability to easily revert to an earlier implementation; and the inability to easily include one script in another. Both of course are do-able with workarounds, but I think that the addition of a deployment configuration file with tagged sets of changes and the elimination of SQL-embedded dependency specification overcome these issues much more effectively and intuitively.

Still, there are two more challenges I would like to overcome:

  1. It would be nice not to need the configuration file at all. Maintaining such a thing can be finicky and error-prone.

  2. I still had to duplicate the entire add_widget() function in the add_widget_v2 script for a very simple change. This means no easy way to simply see the diff for this change in my VCS. It would be nice not to have to copy the entire function.

I think I have solutions for these issues, as well. More in my next post.

  • Thu 26 Jan 2012
  • /computers/databases
  • backtalk
  • §

Backtalk

Chris M wrote:

To get around the need for a configuration file could you not just put all deploy scripts into a sub directory. For example:

sql/deploy/001.alpha/uesrs_table
sql/deploy/002.beta/widgets_table.sql
sql/deploy/002.beta/add_widget.sql

and so on. That way the system knows which order to apply the releases and gives them a human readable name, without needing to set up a configuration file.

As a by-product it also allows humans to more easily find the files related to a particular release.

Adrian Klaver wrote:

If you are using a VCS could the duplicated function problem be solved with it. In other words have your tags point to revisions, for example: alpha r1 beta r2 Them the app would pull the appropriate version of the file from the VCS.

Theory wrote:

@Chris—On initial thought, I have two objections to using subdirectories for tags:

  1. You have to name them carefully in order to ensure proper ordering.
  2. It would be too easy to create conflicts by having two scripts with the same name in two different tags.

But on reflection, these two issues could be overcome, because:

  1. Dependency resolution can make the order of application largely irrelevant.
  2. The name of a change script could be considered unique by tag + file name, rather than just file name.

So I think there may be a place for this approach, though it does create some more complications in the implementation. However, I have some ideas about changing migration scripts in place that simply would not work for this pattern. If you want some idea how, stay tuned for my next post.

Speaking of which, @Adrian, don't get ahead of me! ;-P

—Theory

Josh Berkus wrote:

CEO, PGX

I've been doing quite a bit of DevOps for our clients. There's some issues which the above doesn't address which I'd really like to address:

  1. Making a SQL migrations system work with Git branches/forks, so that you can have fork-per-feature-set, allowing you to easily choose with features to go ahead with at deployment time based on tests.

  2. Association of SQL features with application versions. Possible solved by any solution to (1).

  3. Separate SQL features which require conflicting changes to the same objects (i.e. two different features need to modify the same function).

Being who you are, I imagine integrating tests is coming in further posts.

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