One of the little details that I find matter more and more in enterprises is understanding why a tool behaves a certain way. OSS/home-grown ones often have limited docs, but vendor tools should have great docs. Today I learned about how to easily find Flyway comparison defaults, which is the topic of this post.
I’ve been working with Flyway Desktop for work more and more as we transition from older SSMS plugins to the standalone tool. This series looks at some tips I’ve gotten along the way.
The Defaults
Do you know all the SQL Compare defaults? Would you realize it if someone changed them? Do you think they’re the same in Flyway? I actually don’t know about the latter question, and I’m not digging through and comparing the options.
In any case, I saw an internal discussion recently about documentation and someone pointed out that we have this page that discusses where you change options. It’s good for that purpose, but it doesn’t list the defaults.
However, at the bottom, there are links:
If you click through, then you get a list of default options. There is first a link to the full list of options (SQL Server, Oracle) as well as a link to SQL Compare options (SQL Server, Oracle).
The SQL Server page looks like this:
Note the sentence just below the image, which links to all the options. The second link is for the SQL Compare option explanations. Below this, you see the default options. This is a table of options, which looks like this image. Note this says certain options are set to true and all others false.
If I click through to the full list, I see this:
I can see all the settings and if they are required. I also see an example of the TOML file below this, where I can set these and store them in version control.
If you want to change behavior of the comparison engine in Flyway, or double check if someone else has changed something, this is the place to check.
Note, if you are looking to induce certain behavior, changes should be made in a TOML file for the project and flow through a PR process for approval and into a pipeline. Don’t edit these options directly, or change them in a pipeline.
Flyway Enterprise
Try Flyway Enterprise out today. If you haven’t worked with Flyway Desktop, download it today. There is a free version that organizes migrations and paid versions with many more features.
If you use Flyway Community, download Flyway Desktop and get a GUI for your migration scripts.
Video Walkthrough
I made a quick video showing this as well. You can watch it below, or check out all the Flyway videos I’ve added: