Managing your Database with Liquibase and Gradle

One of the major system development problems has always been how and when we will update the database.

When happen some database change in the development environment, always some questions appear:

Scripts for DB changes were created?
Where to save the DB changes?
When should we apply these changes?
These changes have already been implemented?
How do we track and manage database changes?
Who did these changes?

Liquibase is the library that can help address these issues.

Liquibase is an independent library open source database used to track, manage, and apply changes to the database.

Liquibase works better because it understands what the changes are. For example, a database comparison program would simply see the “person” table on integration has a “firstname” and a “lastname” column, but on live, the “person” table has a “name” column. It would report that you need to drop the “name” column and add a “firstname” and a “lastname” column. While this would leave you with the correct schema, you would lose everyone’s name in the process. With Liquibase, you would have a changeset that says “rename ‘name’ to ‘lastname’ and add a ‘firstname’ column” or, even better, “split the name column on a space and place the values in new ‘firstname’ and ‘lastname’ columns, then drop the ‘name’ column.” Knowing why they are different allows changes to production databases without the fear of losing valuable data.

In this post I will show how you can use the powerful tool Liquibase together with Gradle to automate these tasks, from there will be easy to put Liquibase to work with your continuos integration tools.

Some important concepts:

Changelog file