DEVOPSdigest

Datical announced a new feature to allow Liquibase users easier access to its enterprise-class platform for automating database releases.

The millions of software professionals that use the Liquibase open source project can now seamlessly upgrade to an enterprise-class solution offering greater efficiency, speed and risk reductions for all database deployments without having to change their existing process or workflow.

With more than five million downloads, Liquibase is the leading open source solution helping application teams version and track database changes. While the versioning and tracking provided by Liquibase is sufficient for small teams and projects, as organizations grow and look for an enterprise-scale database release automation solution, Liquibase is not enough. Organizations are left with two options: 1) dedicate resources to expand, customize, integrate and maintain Liquibase or 2) shift to an enterprise, commercial offering, such as Datical.

Datical is built on top of Liquibase and is the primary maintainer of the open source project. Datical brings important enhancements to Liquibase, including pipeline-based workflows, out-of-the-box integrations with all major application release automation solutions, and a powerful rules engine and change simulator that enable application teams to safely automate database code through the software pipeline just like application code.

“Increasingly it’s application developers who have to make database code changes, and most strongly prefer working with an object model for database changes instead of writing SQL,” said Nathan Voxland, founder of the Liquibase open source project and architect at Datical. “With the latest release, the millions of developers that have come to rely on the XML changeset model that Liquibase provides can continue efficiently working with the same model while taking advantage of Datical when their needs expand.”

Liquibase users can benefit from a number of functional capabilities by moving to Datical:

- Enterprise-class support: By upgrading to Datical, Liquibase users can go from: a public online forum to dedicated phone and email support; reading online documentation to having a dedicated implementation and training team; from making one-off pull requests or internally forking and maintaining an open source project to relying on Datical for key features and fixes as a part of the ongoing subscription.

- Enterprise scale: As organizations scale, so do their needs. Manually checking what has been deployed to a given environment with Liquibase can become a nightmare as teams and environments grow. By moving to Datical, users benefit from automatically generated reports and can easily access a centralized web interface that tracks what database changes have been deployed across all environments. As an added bonus, Datical’s web interface has rich features for searching and filtering on a variety of parameters so that any stakeholder can quickly trace or troubleshoot issues with database deployments.

- Enterprise automation: While Liquibase can collect changes from developers and apply changes to a database to get it to the next version, it lacks rigorous validation that can lead to lots of rework and major deployment issues as teams and environments scale. Datical has a robust rules engine that enables developer self-service. Developers are notified immediately if their change needs to be reworked or reconciled against other work. Additionally, Datical simulates the impact of proposed database changes so deployments are much more successful as any errors are caught and can be addressed prior to deployment.