Change Management

Deliberate and Disciplined Change Management in the Database

In PgDCP PostgreSQL is not treated as a “bit bucket” where you just store data for an application. It’s the center and most important part of our services’ universe and requires a deliberate, disciplined, database-first change management approach. While there are many database migrations tools like LiquiBase, Flyway, and Sqitch, they all assume that the problem should be solved in a database-independent manner outside of PostgreSQL. Since the PgDCP approach is to double-down on PostgreSQL and not worry about database portability, we want to perform PosgreSQL-first database change management.

First review Martin Fowler’s Evolutionary Database Design article and then see tools like:

• Zero-downtime schema migrations in Postgres using views
• postgresql-dbpatch, which support conducting database changes and deploying them in a robust and automated way through the database instead of external tools
• Metagration, a PostgreSQL migration tool written in PostgreSQL
• Konfigraf, a Postgres extension that allows you to store and manipulate data in Git repositories stored in tables within the database. This is designed to be used for storage of configuration data for applications and services.