Managing database changes with Sqitch

Nowadays everybody talks about continuous integration, automated test tools, and stuff like that. But almost every time it’s about testing applications. Let’s talk a little about Sqitch, “a database change manager” as they use to call themselves.

Let’s say you’re starting a new project and want to ensure every database change are managed and secured with tests? Just like with an app, you can write tests to ensure everything works and you can have a “revert” method for the changes too. Suppose you are changing a field type and start creating a backup column (fallback ;)), but something goes wrong on the meantime and for some reason, you can’t do a simple rollback… revert it and be happy.

What if your CI says that the application it’s fine and can be released to the production server but “a wild bug appears” and you NEED to revert to a previous version of your service, easy huh? With Docker and one command line, the service is up and running again. But what about the database changes your team did? Just call the revert and be happy :).

Have I mentioned that you can have multiples connection URI at the project and have different environments to apply the changes with a single command?!. Let’s see a few commands to create a simple MySQL database…

Create a folder, initialize GIT in it and initialize the Sqitch project.

mkdir awesomeapp
cd awesomeapp
git init .
sqitch init flipr --uri https://github.com/theory/sqitch-mysql-intro/ --engine mysql

Now you have a ready to go sqitch structure. Now let’s do some basic creates.

sqitch add createcustomeruser -n 'Creation of Customer table'

Add the create table script to the file inside the “deploy” dir.

CREATE TABLE customer (
id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
name VARCHAR(50)
);

Add the verify script, can be a simple select. Add the revert script, guess what’s the command, and after all, you can run the commands below and see the result.

sqitch deploy db:mysql://root@/awesomeapp
sqitch verify db:mysql://root@/awesomeapp
sqitch revert db:mysql://root@/awesomeapp

This was a quick explanation about Sqitch so go ahead and read more at their docs and tutorials, they are pretty good.

Oracle Heterogeneous Services for PostgreSQL (ODBC Driver): Error (HY000,NativeErr = 1)

Hi all!
Some time ago a client reported issues when integrating Oracle and PostgreSQL. The error:

ORA-28500: connection from ORACLE to a non-Oracle system returned this message:
No query has been executed with that handle;
Could not send Query(connection dead) {HY000,NativeErr = 1}

Braking down errors:
Oracle: Connection from ORACLE to a non-Oracle system returned this message
PostgreSQL: {HY000,NativeErr = 1} Could not send Query(connection dead)

Both are general errors:
– Oracle’s one is for any error returned by remote service, when using Oracle Heterogeneous Services (old Database Gateway).
– Postgre’s one is for connections ended.

I also found some other similar errors:
Oracle: ORA-28511: lost RPC connection to heterogeneous remote agent using SID
PostgreSQL: {08S01,NativeErr = 26} Error fetching next row

In summary, the root cause was a firewall configuration ending connection. But what I want to share with you the workaround. 🙂
You know that sometimes, due certain rules, firewall rules may require formal change requests and procedures, so what you can do on database side is basically disable parameter UseDeclareFetch (default is false) in ODBC descriptor, as per below.

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Converting Between SQLServer, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Sybase and others…

Hi all!
I was asked to make a conversion from T-SQL (MSSQL) Procedure to PL/PGSQL. Regarding how boring is this task, the follow link helped me:
http://www.sqlines.com/online

I highly recommend it. The site has a commercial solution to convert all database, but some code can be converted online for free. 🙂
The conversion not fixed at all, but make a good part of the work… And all help is helpful…

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Export/Backup directly to Zip using MKNOD!

We all faced that situation when we have to make a logical backup/export and haven’t so much area to do that, right?
We know the export usually compress a lot on zip/gzip… It wouldn’t be great if we can export directly to compressed file?

zip
This situation become much more common because of Datapump, that requires a directory accessible by database server. If you have not possibility to make a mounting point or any other area, this can help…

## BKP with MKNOD
BKP_DEST=/just/example
DATE=`date +%Y%m%d%H%M`
cd $BKP_DEST
mknod bkp_$DATE.dmp p
gzip  bkp_$DATE.dmp.gz &
### Uncomment and Ajust one of:
## MySQL:
#mysqldump -u $user -p$password $database > bkp_$DATE.dmp
## Oracle (Datapump or EXP)
expdp \"/ as sysdba\" dumpfile=bkp_$DATE.dmp full=y directory=DIRECTORY_EXAMPLE logfile=log_bkpzipped.log compress=y
#expdp $user/$password dumpfile=bkp_$DATE.dmp full=y directory=DIRECTORY_EXAMPLE logfile=log_bkpzipped.log
#exp \"/ as sysdba\" file=bkp_$DATE.dmp log=log_bkpzipped.log compress=y [tables=owner.table,..] [owner=schema1,..] [...]

Hugs!
Matheus.