Simplifying Data Import and Export for Database Development

Extracting and importing data for development and testing is made trickier due to issues such as constraints, dependencies, and special data types. This article introduces a cross-RDBMS solution with JSON for data storage and PowerShell cmdlets that use ODBC to help automate extraction and import, and JSON Schema for validation. Just provide a DSN, and you’re good to go! Read more

Planning a Database Testing Strategy for Flyway

With Flyway, you can adopt a test-driven development strategy that will allow you to test and evaluate databases, and database objects, at every phase of the database development lifecycle. The further down the delivery pipeline that bugs appear, the more costly in time and resources they are to fix. This approach will allow you to catch many of them before the database change even gets committed to version control, making a continuous delivery process much easier to adopt and sustain. Read more

Bulk Loading Data via a PowerShell Script in Flyway

The test data management strategy for any RDBMS needs to include a fast, automated way of allowing developers to "build-and-fill" multiple copies of any version of the database, for ad-hoc or automated testing. The technique presented in this article uses a baseline migration script to create the empty database at the required version, which then triggers a PowerShell callback script that bulk loads in the right version of the data. Read more