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Announcing v0.18: Drift Detection, SQLAlchemy Support, Composite Schemas and More

· 6 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas

Hi everyone,

Thanks for joining us today for another release announcement! We have a bunch of really exciting features to share with you today, so let's get started! Here's what we'll cover:

  • Drift Detection - A common source of database trouble is that the schema in your database doesn't match the schema in your code. This can happen for a variety of reasons, including manual changes to the database, or changes made by other tools. Today, we are happy to announce the availability of a new feature that lets you automatically detect these changes, and alerts you when they happen.
  • SQLAlchemy Support - SQLAlchemy is a popular Python ORM. Developers using SQLAlchemy can use Atlas to automatically plan schema migrations for them, based on the desired state of their schema instead of crafting them by hand.
  • VSCode ERDs - We've added a new feature to our VSCode extension that lets you visualize your database schema as an ERD diagram.
  • Composite Schemas - The newly added composite_schema data source lets you combine multiple schemas into one, which is useful for managing schemas that are loaded from multiple sources or to describe applications that span multiple database schemas.

Announcing v0.17: Triggers and Improved ERDs

· 7 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas

Hi everyone,

I hope you are enjoying the holiday season, because we are here today with the first Atlas release of 2024: v0.17. It's been only a bit over a week since our last release, but we have some exciting new features we couldn't wait to share with you:

  • Trigger Support - Atlas now supports managing triggers on MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and SQLite databases.
  • Improved ERDs - You can now visualize your schema's SQL views, as well as create filters to select the specific database objects you wish to see.

Without further ado, let's dive in!

Announcing v0.16: ClickHouse support, Hibernate Provider, Baseline Schemas and more

· 10 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since our last version announcement and today I'm happy to share with you v0.16, which includes some very exciting improvements for Atlas:

  • ClickHouse Beta Support - ClickHouse is a high-performance, columnar database optimized for analytics and real-time query processing. Support for ClickHouse in Atlas has been one of the top requested features by our community in the past year. Today, we are happy to announce that ClickHouse is officially in Beta!
  • Hibernate Provider - Atlas now supports loading the desired state of your database directly from your Hibernate code. Hibernate developers can now join developers from the GORM, Sequelize, TypeORM and more communities who can now use Atlas to manage their database schema.
  • Baseline Schemas - In some cases, your migrations rely on certain database objects to exist apriori to your application schema, for example extensions or legacy tables. Atlas now supports defining a baseline schema which will be loaded before automatically planning and applying your migrations.
  • Proactive conflict detection - Teams that have connected their project to Atlas Cloud will get a prompt in the CLI if their migration directory is out of sync with the latest version in Atlas Cloud. This ensures that new migration files are added in a sequential order, preventing unexpected behavior.
  • Mermaid Support - Atlas now supports generating a Mermaid diagram of your database schema. This is a great way to visualize your database schema and share it with your team.
  • Review Policies - Users working with declarative migrations can now define "review policies" which can define thresholds for which kinds of changes require human review and which can be auto-applied.
  • Postgres Sequences - Another long awaited feature, Atlas now supports managing sequences in PostgreSQL.

I know that's quite a list, so let's dive right in!

Announcing Automatic Migrations for Hibernate Users

· 9 min read
Dor Avraham
Dor Avraham
TL;DR

You can now import the desired database schema from your Hibernate project into Atlas, and use it to automatically plan migrations for you.

See an example

Introduction

Hibernate-ORM is one of the most popular ORMs for Java, so much so that parts of it have evolved into the JPA standard and the Jakarta APIs.

Today, we are excited to announce that Atlas now supports loading and managing Hibernate schemas.

Atlas is a modern tool for managing your database schema. It allows you to inspect, plan, lint and apply schema changes to your database. It is designed to be used by developers, DBAs and DevOps engineers alike.

By using Atlas, Hibernate users can now enjoy these benefits:

  • A declarative migration flow - Atlas can operate like a "Terraform for databases", where by running atlas schema apply the application schema is applied on a target database.
  • Automatic schema migration planning - Alternatively, Atlas can operate using a more traditional versioned migration flow. However, contrary to most tools, Atlas will automatically analyze the diff between the migration directory and the current application data model, and will produce correct and safe SQL migration files.
  • CI for schema changes - Atlas can be used during CI to make sure you never merge a pull request that will break your database schema.
  • Modern CD integrations - Atlas integrates seamlessly with modern deployment tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Flux, and ArgoCD. This allows you to deploy changes to your database schema as part of your existing deployment pipelines.
  • Visualization - Atlas users can create beautiful, shareable ERDs of their application data model with a single command.
  • .. and much more (read more about Atlas features).
note

Hibernate support is currently in Beta and we would love to hear your feedback ❤️. Please reach out to us on Discord or by opening an issue.

GitOps for Databases, Part 2: Atlas Operator and ArgoCD

· 7 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas
info

This is the second post in a two-part tutorial, which demonstrates how to use the Atlas Operator in tandem with Atlas Cloud and ArgoCD to create a slick, modern GitOps workflow for managing your database migrations natively in Kubernetes.

In part one, we demonstrated how to initialize an Atlas project, and create a CI/CD pipeline that automatically plans, verifies and stores your database migrations in Atlas Cloud using GitHub Actions.

In this part, we will show how to deploy these migrations using the Atlas Operator and ArgoCD to demonstrate a complete GitOps workflow for database migrations.

How to GitOps your Database Migrations on Kubernetes

"We can wrap existing schema management solutions into containers, and run them in Kubernetes as Jobs. But that is SILLY. That is not how we work in Kubernetes."

-Viktor Farcic, DevOps ToolKit

GitOps for Databases, Part 1: CI/CD

· 10 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas
info

This is the first post in a two-part tutorial, which demonstrates how to use the Atlas Operator in tandem with Atlas Cloud and ArgoCD to create a slick, modern GitOps workflow for managing your database migrations natively in Kubernetes.

GitOps is a software development and deployment methodology that uses Git as the central repository for both code and infrastructure configuration, enabling automated and auditable deployments.

ArgoCD is a Kubernetes-native continuous delivery tool that implements GitOps principles. It uses a declarative approach to deploy applications to Kubernetes, ensuring that the desired state of the application is always maintained.

Kubernetes Operators are software extensions to Kubernetes that enable the automation and management of complex, application-specific, operational tasks with domain-specific knowledge within a Kubernetes cluster.

In this tutorial, we will use the Atlas Operator in tandem with Atlas Cloud and ArgoCD to create a slick, modern GitOps workflow for managing your database migrations natively in Kubernetes.

For the sake of brevity, we are going to split this guide into two parts:

  1. In part one, we will show how to initialize an Atlas project, and create a CI/CD pipeline that will automatically plan, verify and store your database migrations in Atlas Cloud using GitHub Actions.
  2. In part two, we will show how to deploy these migrations using the Atlas Operator and ArgoCD to demonstrate a complete GitOps workflow for database migrations.

Announcing v0.15: Interactive Declarative Migrations, Functions, Procedures and Domains

· 11 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas

Hi everyone!

It's been a few weeks since our last version announcement and today I'm happy to share with you
v0.15, which includes some very exciting improvements for Atlas:

  • Interactive Declarative Migrations - Atlas supports a Terraform-like workflow for managing your database schema using the schema apply command. In this release we have added a new "Lint and Edit" mode to this command, which will analyze your schema changes for issues and will allow you to edit them interactively before applying them to your database.
  • Functions and Stored Procedures - Atlas now supports creating and managing functions and stored procedures in your database schema.
  • Postgres Domains - In addition, Atlas now supports Postgres Domains . A domain is essentially a data type with optional constraints (restrictions on the allowed set of values).
  • TypeORM Integration - TypeORM is a popular ORM for Node.js. In this release, we are happy to announce the TypeORM integration, which allows you to automatically generate your database schema from your TypeORM entities, create visualizations and more.

Let's dive right in!

Automatic migrations for Microsoft SQL Server

· 6 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas
TL;DR

In this guide we will demonstrate how to use Atlas to automatically generate migrations for Microsoft SQL Server databases.

To skip the intro and go straight to the demo, click here.

Introduction

As your application's data model evolves, you will need to make changes to your database schema. In today's world, where teams are expected to own their infrastructure and ship code faster than ever, it is important to have a reliable and repeatable process for managing database schema changes.

Atlas lets you manage your database schema as code. It is a modern schema management tool that applies concepts from modern DevOps tools to database schema management. Using Atlas, teams can automatically plan, verify, deploy and monitor database schema changes.

Microsoft SQL Server, one of the longest-standing database engines in our business, was first released by Microsoft in 1989. MS-SQL is the go-to database for Windows environments in many industries.

In this guide, we will demonstrate how to use Atlas to automatically generate migrations for your Microsoft SQL Server databases.

Revamping the GitHub Actions Experience for Atlas

· 5 min read
Rotem Tamir
Building Atlas

Hi everyone!

I'm very happy to share with you some of the recent improvements to Atlas, specifcially around GitHub Actions. In August of last year, we released our first version of the GitHub Actions experience for Atlas. It was a modest start, which included the ability to verify the safety and correctness of schema migrations during the CI process.

Over the past year, we have slowly added more features to the GitHub Actions experience, including the ability to sync migration directories to Atlas Cloud, deploy migrations, and even install Atlas. As often happens with quickly evolving systems, we felt that the API became complex, carrying over use cases and experiences that have become obsolete or superseded by better ones since the initial release.

At Ariga, the team developing Atlas, we have written a document named the "R&D Manifesto", which lists some the principles that we commit to as individuals and as an organization. One of them is "Obsess over APIs and DevEx" - we believe that the key to building a successful product is to provide the best possible experience to our users, and that starts with clear, consistent and composable APIs that empower our users to achieve amazing feats of engineering.

With that in mind, our team has been working hard in the past few weeks to revamp the GitHub Actions experience for Atlas. Here's a quick summary of the changes:

  1. We've moved all actions into a single repo - ariga/atlas-action. (With the exception of ariga/setup-atlas.)
  2. The API has been reviewed and updated to make sure it is consistent among the different actions and with the rest of the Atlas ecosystem.
  3. We've rewritten the code in Go, which is the language we use for all of our internal tools. This allows us to share code between the CLI and the GitHub Actions, and to provide a more consistent experience between the two. In addition, looking forward we have greatly simplified the process of adding new GitHub Actions as needed.

Announcing Automatic Migrations for Sequelize Users

· 8 min read
Ronen Lubin
Software Engineer
TL;DR

You can now import the desired database schema from your Sequelize project into Atlas, and use it to automatically plan migrations for you.

See an example

Introduction

Sequelize is one of the most popular ORMs for Node.js. It supports a variety of databases, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL Server.

Atlas is a modern tool for managing your database schema. It allows you to inspect, plan, lint and execute schema changes to your database. It is designed to be used by developers, DBAs and DevOps engineers alike.

Atlas supports many ways to describe database schemas: Using Schema Loaders, plain SQL, a connection to another database or using Atlas HCL.

Today, I'm happy to announce that Atlas supports loading the desired schema from Sequelize projects. This means that Sequelize users can now use Atlas instead of the existing Sequelize CLI to manage their database schema.

By using Atlas, Sequelize users can now enjoy these benefits:

  • A declarative migration flow - Atlas can operate like a "Terraform for databases", where by running atlas schema apply the application schema is applied on a target database.
  • Automatic schema migration planning - Alternatively, Atlas can operate using a more traditional versioned migration flow. However, contrary to most tools, Atlas will automatically analyze the diff between the migration directory and the current application data model, and will produce correct and safe SQL migration files.
  • CI for schema changes - Atlas can be used during CI to make sure you never merge a pull request that will break your database schema.
  • Modern CD integrations - Atlas integrates seamlessly with modern deployment tools such as Kubernetes, Terraform, Helm, Flux, and ArgoCD. This allows you to deploy changes to your database schema as part of your existing deployment pipelines.
  • Visualization - Atlas users can create beautiful, shareable ERDs of their application data model with a single command.
  • .. and much more (read more about Atlas features)