Liquibase

Score8.6 out of 10

137 Reviews and Ratings

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Liquibase

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What is Liquibase?

Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers.

Liquibase value proposition:

Liquibase speeds up the development process by closing the velocity gap. By bringing CI/CD automation to the database, teams can code at full speed and break through the database bottleneck of manual reviews.
Boasting a 94% reduction in errors, Liquibase enables teams to deliver continuously with full confidence. Liquibase equips teams with the tools needed to monitor changes, audit databases, detect possible malware, and improve observability.
Liquibase empowers teams to collaborate. By treating database code like application code, Liquibase is designed to make it easier for app developers to work with the database team by automating tedious, manual, and error-prone processes.
Liquibase enables teams to scale deployments while also enforcing governance and stay compliant, so that they can deploy up to 3x more often.

Solutions Ideal for Cloud Native and Hybrid Data Applications

Liquibase Community

Liquibase Community provides developers the ability to treat database changes as code so that they can version and deploy them along with application code. The Liquibase Open Source project started in 2006, and now Liquibase Community has over 100M downloads.

Liquibase Secure

Liquibase Secure brings DevOps to the database, promoting database standardization, quality, and compliance within CI/CD automation across more than 60 database platforms. Built on the foundation of Liquibase Community, Liquibase Secure provides additional capabilities and services including:

Instant and consistent deployments across teams and projects with standardized database change workflows
Automated policy enforcement to enable continuous compliance, governance, and security
Advanced versioning and targeted rollback capabilities
Automatic drift detection to identify out-of-process changes and the source to take action and ensure the security of the data
Database workflow visibility with insights for optimization, triggered automation, governance, and security
Expert support and guidance from the creators of Liquibase

Categories & Use Cases

Sahil Khan View profile

Data Analyst in Product Management at Rapidops (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Liquibase is used in our organization to revise and release database schema changes safer and faster from development stage to production stage. Liquibase automates the database CI/CD pipelines to improve speed, reliability and remove manual code reviews. Liquibase improved developer experience and collaboration within the organization. It is easy to manage and deploy database changes.

Pros

Liquibase manages database version very well.
Liquibase is faster and safer in releasing database changes from development to production.
Liquibase does well in automating the deployment of database changes.

Cons

The setup and rollback process can be made easy, as of now it is a bit complex and difficult.
Liquibase can improve in performance optimization to reduce execution time.
Liquibase can improve their error logging for version mismatches.

Return on Investment

Liquibase got rollback capabilities which minimizes downtime and maintain database integrity.
Members within a team can collaborate efficiently and effectively on the database changes.
Automated deployment reduces the risk of human errors and ensures consistency.

Other Software Used

Jira Software, Engagedly, Atlassian Confluence

Verified User

Employee in Engineering (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We needed a technical solution that would simplify and streamlined how we managed changes for different types of databases (both SQL and NoSQL), as data flows from and to various sources. In particular it was important that the solution would allow an easier way to rollback in case of problems and that it would put us on track to develop compliance with NoSQL databases

Pros

Support for a great variety of databases
Good documentation
Easy to integrate with existing systems

Cons

Customer support could be quicker
The user experience in using it has not always been consistent due to the CLI

Return on Investment

Safer development due to the possibility of creating a DEV environment, leading to higher confidence with deployments in production
Fewer databases errors as they were caught early (either through pre-deployment data quality checks or testing better)
Increase version control for databases changes

Other Software Used

PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake

Usability

Verified User

Vice-President in Information Technology (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have automated our database deployments using open-source Liquibase. Process helped reduce the need for DBA involvement during application releases, and provided the ability to tag and release DB artifacts as app artifacts.

Pros

Database change logs
Database change sets
Rollback
Easy integration with build tools
contexts

Cons

Multi schema automation
Stored procedure support
PLSQL block support
logging

Return on Investment

Quicker development of database artifacts
Easier tracking of DB changes
Easier and quicker rollback if needed
DB rollback testing

Other Software Used

ServiceNow DevOps, Splunk Enterprise, Dremio

Kunwarpreet Singh

Software Engineering Lead in Engineering at Optum (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using Liquibase in our project for handling any database management and version control activity changes on MySQL database server. This involves creating any database user or any other DDL and DML database transactions involving table, index creations along with modifying or altering existing tables/views/indexes. As part of our DevOps automation strategy it is integrated into our CI/CD pipelines using github actions pipeline deployments to manage schema changes across multiple environments from Dev to Stage and then to Prod in a controlled and repeatable way. Liquibase is helping in solving our few business problems that includes reducing any database changes deployment time, human prone errors and manual efforts to add database changes on various environments and helps in tracking all database changes as part of a well defined version control system and Liquibase tracks all the database changes in DATABASELOGCHANGE table it helps in tracking and auditing purposes.

Pros

Liquibase allows us to track every change made to the database schema using changelog files (XML, YAML, or SQL) where this change is tracked, auditable, and can be rolled back if needed from DATABASECHANGELOG table which eventually helps in being compliant and trackable which are mandatory in my company as we are part of a healthcare organization.
It helps in supporting deploying the same changelog across multiple environments (dev, staging, prod) without any manual intervention from CI/CD github actions pipeline.
It helps in comparing two database schemas and generate changelogs automatically to bring one in sync with the other using "Liquibase diffChangeLog" command

Cons

diff and diffChangeLog commands are powerfu in Liquibase to make two database schema in sync but can produce noisy or incomplete results, especially when comparing across different database types or versions.
If two developers create changes with the same id in different files, Liquibase will throw a conflict even if they’re for different modules, along with this changelog files can become large and difficult to organize.
While Liquibase supports rollbacks, they often require manual intervention fgor complex changes for example in data migrations or multi-step schema changes, rollback logic can be hard to write and maintain.
Currently liquibase have less integration with IDE's like Intellij or VSCode which makes sometime hard to manage changesets and scripts

Return on Investment

By using Liquibase it allows faster deployment cycle across environment where changes are automated and version-controlled, reducing deployment time by up to approx 70%.
Improved auditability and compliance where liquibase DATABASECHANGELOG table provide a complete audit trail.
Liquibase usage has drastically reduced database downtime with rollback capabilities and pre-deployment validation and helps in preventing bad schema changes from causing outages where in my current project estimated downtime reduction of 30–40%.
Observed a 60–70% reduction in production incidents related to schema mismatches or missing migrations.

Alternatives Considered

Redgate Flyway

Other Software Used

Redgate Flyway, DbVisualizer, MySQL Workbench

aaron motley

Cloud Network Engineer II in Information Technology at Allied National (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Liquibase for version control of both Oracle Databases (version 12c to 19c) and Postgres. We are pairing it with Gitlab and our use so far has been leaps and bounds better than any previous solution we have used in the past. Version control on databases is always a pain, but with Liquibase, it has helped our team of over a dozen developers be able to control, validate, and not break each other's work in ways that no other tool has been able to do yet.