LiquiBase

LiquiBase

Screenshot  Demonstration of the LiquiBase GUI
Developer(s)	Nathan Voxland
Stable release	2.0.0 / December 19, 2010 (2010-12-19)
Development status	Active
Written in	Java
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Software development
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	http://www.liquibase.org/

LiquiBase is an open source database-independent library for tracking, managing and applying database changes. It was started in 2006 to allow easier tracking of database changes, especially in an agile software development environment.

Overview

All changes to the database are stored in XML files and identified by a combination of an "id" and "author" tag as well as the name of the file itself. A list of all applied changes is stored in each database which is consulted on all database updates to determine what new changes need to be applied. As a result, there is no database version number but this approach allows it to work in environments with multiple developers and code branches.

Major Functionality

• Over 30 built-in database refactorings
• Extensibility to create custom changes
• Update database to current version
• Rollback last X changes to database
• Rollback database changes to particular date/time
• Rollback database to "tag"
• SQL for Database Updates and Rollbacks can be saved for manual review
• Stand-alone IDE and Eclipse plug-in
• "Contexts" for including/excluding change sets to execute
• Database diff report
• Database diff changelog generation
• Ability to create changelog to generate an existing database
• Database change documentation generation
• DBMS Check, user check, and SQL check preconditions
• Ability to split change log into multiple files for easier management
• Executable via command line, Ant, Maven, Servlet container, or Spring
• Support for 10 database systems

Sample Change Log File

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 
<databaseChangeLog
        xmlns="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.3"
        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
        xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/1.3
        http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-1.3.xsd">
    <preConditions>
            <dbms type="oracle"/>
    </preConditions>
 
    <changeSet id="1" author="alice">
        <createTable tableName="news">
            <column name="id" type="int">
                <constraints primaryKey="true" nullable="false"/>
            </column>
            <column name="title" type="varchar(50)"/>
        </createTable>
    </changeSet>
 
    <changeSet id="12" author="bob">
        <createSequence sequenceName="seq_news"/>
    </changeSet>
 
    <changeSet id="2" author="bob" context="test">
        <insert tableName="news">
            <column name="id" value="1"/>
            <column name="title" value="Liquibase 0.8 Released"/>
        </insert>
        <insert tableName="news">
            <column name="id" value="2"/>
            <column name="title" value="Liquibase 0.9 Released"/>
        </insert>
    </changeSet>
</databaseChangeLog>

See also

• openDBcopy
• dbdeploy
• dbmigrate
• migrate4j
• SQL Power Architect can generate liquibase.xml from data model.

External links

• LiquiBase home page
• LiquiBase Blog
• Quick Start Guide
• LiquiBase Manual
• Techniques for Successful Evolutionary Database Development
• Automation for the people: Hands-free database migration by Paul Duvall