Losing data is painful for almost all organizations. This is one of the reasons teams are very cautious when it comes to making changes to their databases. In fact, many teams set explicit policies on what kinds of changes to the database are allowed, often completely prohibiting any change that is destructive.

Destructive changes are changes to a database schema that result in loss of data. For instance, consider a statement such as:

ALTER TABLE `users` DROP COLUMN `email_address`;

This statement is considered destructive because whatever data is stored in the email_address column will be deleted from disk, with no way to recover it.

With the release of v0.6.0, we are happy to announce official support for a style of workflow for managing changes to database schemas that we have been experimenting with in the past months: Versioned Migration Authoring.

TL;DR​

• Atlas supports a declarative workflow (similar to Terraform) where users provide the desired database schema in a simple data definition language and Atlas calculates a plan to get a target database to that state. This workflow is supported by the schema apply command.
• Many teams prefer a more imperative approach where each change to the database schema is checked-in to source control and reviewed during code-review. This type of workflow is commonly called versioned migrations (or change based migrations) and is supported by many established tools such as Flyway and Liquibase.
• The downside of the versioned migration approach is, of course, that it puts the burden of planning the migration on developers. As part of the Atlas project we advocate for a third combined approach that we call "Versioned Migration Authoring".
• Versioned Migration Authoring is an attempt to combine the simplicity and expressiveness of the declarative approach with the control and explicitness of versioned migrations.
• To use Versioned Migration Authoring today, use the atlas migrate diff command. See the Getting Started section below for instructions.

With the release of v0.5.0, we are happy to announce a very significant milestone for the project. While this version includes some cool features (such as multi-file schemas) and a swath of incremental improvements and bugfixes, there is one feature that we're particularly excited about and want to share with you in this post.

Today, I'm happy to announce the release of v0.4.2 of the Atlas CLI. This version includes many improvements and fixes, but I wanted to share with you exciting news about something I personally worked on. As of v0.4.2, Atlas includes preview support for CockroachDB 🎉

A few days ago we released v0.4.1 of Atlas. Along with a multitude of improvements and fixes, I'm happy to announce the release of a feature that we've been planning for a while: Project Files.

Project files provide a way to describe and interact with multiple environments while working with Atlas. A project file is a file named atlas.hcl that contains one or more env blocks, each describing an environment. Each environment has a reference to where the schema definition file resides, a database URL and an array of the schemas in the database that are managed by Atlas:

Today we are glad to announce the release of the official Atlas Terraform Provider.

Database inspection is the process of connecting to a database to extract metadata about the way data is structured inside it. In this post, we will present some use cases for inspecting a database, demonstrate why it is a non-trivial problem to solve, and finally show how it can be solved using Atlas, an open-source package (and command-line tool) written in Go that we are maintaining at Ariga.

Last week we released v0.3.2 of the Atlas CLI.

Atlas is an open source tool that helps developers manage their database schemas. Atlas plans database migrations for you based on your desired state. The two main commands are inspect and apply. The inspect command inspects your database and the apply command runs a migration by providing an HCL document with your desired state.

The most notable change in this version is the ability to interact with multiple schemas in both database inspection and migration (the apply command).

Earlier this week we released v0.3.0 of the Atlas CLI. This version features a ton of improvements to database inspection, diffing and migration planning. You can read about those in the release notes page, but we wanted to take the time and introduce the biggest feature in this release, the Atlas Management UI.

At Ariga, we are building a new kind of platform that we call an Operational Data Graph. This platform enables software engineers to manage, maintain and access complex data architectures as if they were one database. Today, we are open-sourcing a CLI for Atlas, one of the fundamental building blocks of our platform.