DbUpX

Extensions to DbUp supporting easy filtering, ordering and versioning:

• a journaling system that stores hashes of script contents, so we know if they need to rerun,
• a concept of "dependency comments" in scripts that let you more easily control the ordering of scripts,
• protection against code reorganisation affecting long script names,
• utilities for sorting and filtering scripts in helpful ways.

Background

The philosophy of DbUp is that database upgrades should absolutely not be figured out automatically by tools that infers the necessary transitions to reach a target state. They are only able to do this in the simplest of cases, while they do a poor job in the majority of cases.

Instead, the transitions required should be explicitly stated. This way there is full control over how information is preserved, transformed or (where it makes sense) even discarded by the transitions.

To that end DbUp establishes a pattern for embedding scripts and code that describe the transitions, a simple engine for executing each script and a "journal" system for tracking whether scripts have already run, by name.

Other than that it is very unopinionated. In this library we add a few more extensions that fill in some gaps.

LINQ is the right way to manipulate sequences of objects

DbUp provides ways to generate a sequence of scripts, through script providers. It also provides an engine that executes a sequence of scripts. Such a sequence is represented by the type IEnumerable<SqlScript>.

You want to be able to control which of those scripts run, and in what order. The obvious way to do this is to use LINQ extension methods such as Concat,Where, Select and OrderBy. So this library provides ways to easily insert your own LINQ filtering straight into the building of your upgrade engine, without breaking built-in behaviour or having to implement extra classes.

Run once vs. run always

Some scripts define views and stored procs, and it's easier to just run them every time you perform an upgrade.

On the other hand, if you have to upgrade a lot of databases, and you have a lot of such scripts, it can take a significant amount of time, which may mean downtime for your users.

This library provides a journal table that stores a hash of the contents of each script, so it can detect if a script has changed since it was run. If it has, it runs again. This takes care of almost all use cases in an optimal way. If you want a script to be "run once", then simply don't make changes to it.

Brittle long script names

In DbUp scripts are gathered from embedded resources and script generator classes. They wind up with long names that include the full path to the script within the namespace system of the CLR.

This makes the journal contents brittle against code reorganisations. Instead it's better to remove the namespace prefix. This library has an extension method WithPrefix that takes care of this, while also serving as a useful way to select a subset of your scripts.

Usage

Build and run your upgrader in the usual way, but use JournalToSqlWithHashing to get both the change-detecting form of journaling and also the ability to perform your own custom sorting:

var upgrader = DeployChanges.To.SqlDatabase(connectionString)
    .WithScriptsAndCodeEmbeddedInAssembly(typeof(MyAssembly).Assembly)
    .LogToConsole()        
    .JournalToSqlWithHashing(scripts => /* filter and sort the scripts here */)    
    .Build()
    .PerformUpgrade();

For example, you may have two sets of scripts:

• The first is in the namespace MyAssembly.Scripts.ByDate, containing the transitions to be applied in chronological order, such as adding new tables, adding new columns to existing tables, etc. You name the scripts after the date/time when they were written, so to sort them chronologically you can just sort them lexicographically, by name.
• The second is in the namespace MyAssembly.Scripts.Dependent. It includes scripts that define views, stored procs and custom data types. These sometimes depend on each other, but can be modified and then need to be re-executed, and hence ordering them correctly is more challenging.

Solution:

var upgrader = DeployChanges.To.SqlDatabase(connectionString)
    .WithScriptsAndCodeEmbeddedInAssembly(typeof(MyAssembly).Assembly)
    .LogToConsole()        
    .JournalToSqlWithHashing(scripts =>
    
        scripts.WithPrefix("MyAssembly.Scripts.ByDate.")
               .OrderBy(s => s.Name).Concat(
               
        scripts.WithPrefix("MyAssembly.Scripts.Dependent.")
               .OrderByDependency("#requires"))
    )
    .Build()
    .PerformUpgrade();

DbUp's standard WithScriptsAndCodeEmbeddedInAssembly method is used to collect all the scripts regardless of their location in the code. This means the scripts all have long names prefixed with their namespaces.

Then the custom filter expression passed to JournalToSqlWithHashing is able to identify and deal with the two subsets of scripts appropriately. It uses WithPrefix to find the ByDate scripts and orders them by name (i.e. by date) and then it finds the Dependent scripts and uses DbUpX's OrderByDependency feature to make sure they are ordered according to how they depend on one another.

The WithPrefix actually removes the prefix from each script's name, so what is recorded in the journal table will not become incorrect if you move the scripts to elsewhere in your namespace.

The Dependent scripts declare the scripts they depend on by including comments such as:

-- #requires UserTable, ProductTable

See OrderByDependencyTests.cs for examples.

What about C# scripts?

In DbUp it is possible to implement IScript instead of embedding a static SQL script. As we cannot cache the contents of C# before we execute it, it seems like we cannot support this use case.

However, as long as IScript is used correcty, there is no problem. The ProvideScript method is meant to generate and return a SQL script to be executed later, and we can hash that script.

public class MyScript : IScript
{
    public string ProvideScript(Func<IDbCommand> dbCommandFactory)
    {
        // don't have any side-effects on database state here!

        return "dynamically generated SQL...";
    }
}

Do not execute any SQL commands inside ProvideScript that modify the state of the database in any way. The method is called before the engine starts running scripts, so if you modify the database here then you mess up the order in which effects occur.

You can read information from the database using the command factory provided, and use that information to influence the script you generate and return.

Note that DbUpX provides some helpful extension methods that are like a minimal form of the excellent Dapper library, except they operate on Func<IDbCommand> to better fit in with DbUp.

Running the Tests

Some of the tests (IntegrationTests.cs) run on a real SQL Server database. You can spin one up by installing docker and running the start-sql.sh script. (On Windows you can rename it to start-sql.bat and it should still be correct.)