Liquibase Status: August 2015

This is the first in a planned monthly post designed to give a better window into Liquibase development and the Liquibase community. I’d appreciate any feedback you have on how helpful (or not) it is and/or any suggestions you have.

My work on Liquibase was split last month between a 3.4.1 release and continuing work on Liquibase 4.0. The full scope (and timeline) of 4.0 is still being determined, but the high-level goals are to:

• Simplify and standardize the codebase
• Improve the testability
• Make larger internal API changes to support new functionality

So far, the 4.0 work has focused on simplifying the Statement/Change/Generator/Snapshot logic and improving the testing of the interaction between Liquibase and the database. For more information and to help review the code so far, see https://forum.liquibase.org/#Topic/49382000001343003

The goal of 4.0 is to have no end-user breaking changes, but there will be API changes that will affect extension writers. Documentation on the upgrade process will be part of the release.

Beyond codebase changes, I switched the blog hosting from a separate server to being a part of the liquibase.org github pages sites. Anyone using an RSS reader should have been redirected, and for everyone else the main difference should be posts now showing in the left navigation of liquibase.org and a more consistent design. For me, I now have one less server to maintain which is always good.

I also recently became the proud owner of the @liquibase, twitter account so feel free to follow and/or contact me there.

Finally, I want to use each monthly update as an opportunity to recognize a different contributor. As an open source project, Liquibase is a group effort with usually very little recognition.

This month I’d like to thank Mark Chesney. Over the last few months he has sent nearly 50 pull requests and has not only done a good job of managing the corresponding liquibase.jira.com issues, but has also helped answer questions, find work-arounds, and triage issues on other issues as well. Most of his work has centered around improving MS SqlServer support, and I appreciate all he has done.