My Experience using Liquibase

In a modernization effort for a federal client, we leveraged Liquibase to improve visibility and automation with the database deployments. We have multiple AWS Aurora PostgreSQL databases that have to maintain consistency through each environment. Liquibase helps us to track what data is in each environment and allows us to build once and deploy many. This has helped us to make a major improvement in transparency for our client while also building a consistent and repeatable process going forward as the databases get updated. We also are utilizing Liquibase for a database reconciliation effort to deploy changes into a newly created schema to reconcile data after a migration. Liquibase allows us to make these deployments which will normally take months to minutes. Truly enjoy the service.

It has made deployments more repeatable than safer and easier. The service itself does have some guardrails, however, if the database administrators and engineers who are setting up the project do not understand how to use Liquibase, the purpose of the design is not helpful. This takes a lot of expertise from where to store the code, to how it is triggered and deployed to what service it is built upon. Without that background, bad data can go into the database, and many errors can block progress. Some things can be done easier with writing sql directly to the database compared to following a format that allows you to deploy as code. So this is a great service, but it takes significant effort to get up and running. Once running, it does become repeatable, maybe even easier, but safety is part Liquibase, yes, but also a big part of a secure infrastructure environment to support Liquibase.