2 posts tagged with "golang-migrate"

Database migrations are fundamental to modern software development, allowing teams to evolve their database schema in a controlled and versioned manner. As applications grow and requirements change, the ability to reliably alter your database is crucial for maintaining data integrity and application stability.

Atlas was originally created to support Ent, a popular Go ORM. From the start, Ent shipped with a simple "auto-migration" feature that could set up the database schema based on the Ent schema. However, as the project grew popular, it became clear that a more robust versioned migration system was needed.

Ent's authors had hoped to add functionality based on the existing "auto-migration" engine to generate migration files, and use an off-the-shelf migration tool to apply them. The most promising candidate was golang-migrate, a widely adopted migration tool in the Go community renowned for its simplicity and wide database support. But like many tools that start simple and grow popular, we realized that golang-migrate, too, has its limitations, and they led us to expand on its abilities.

In this article, we’ll explore some common challenges teams face with traditional migration tools like golang-migrate, and how Atlas takes a different approach to improve the developer experience.

Most software projects are backed by a database, that's widely accepted. The schema for this database almost always evolves over time: requirements change, features are added, and so the application's model of the world must evolve. When this model evolves, the database's schema must change as well. No one wants to (or should) connect to their production database and apply changes manually, which is why we need tools to manage schema changes. Most ORMs have basic support, but eventually projects tend to outgrow them. This is when projects reach to choose a schema migration tool.

Many such tools exist, and it's hard to know which to choose. My goal in this article is to present 3 popular choices for migration tools for Go projects to help you make this decision.