2 posts tagged with "migration tools"

If you've searched for "DACPAC for PostgreSQL," you already know the answer: there isn't one. DACPAC is a Microsoft file format, built into SQL Server Data Tools and deployed with SqlPackage, and it has no equivalent outside the SQL Server ecosystem. What you're actually looking for isn't the file format, it's the workflow: define the schema once, let the tool diff it against a live database, and deploy the result without hand-written migration scripts. Atlas gives you that workflow for PostgreSQL.

Building a loveable migration tool​

"I just love dealing with migrations!"

-No developer, ever.

Over the past three years, Ariel, my co-founder and I (along with the rest of our team at Ariga), have been working on Atlas, a database schema-as-code tool. After many years of building software professionally, we've come to realize that one of the most stressful, tedious and error-prone parts of building software is dealing with database migrations.

In case you are unfamiliar with the term, database migrations are the process of changing the structure of a database. When applications evolve, the database schema needs to evolve with them. This is commonly done by writing scripts that describe the changes to the database schema. These scripts are then executed in order to apply the changes to the database. This process has earned the name "migrations" and an infamous reputation among developers.

The secret to building a successful tool for developers is to be relentlessly focused on the user experience. When we started working on Atlas, we spent a long time researching the common issues developers face when dealing with migrations. We wanted to understand the root causes of these issues and design a tool that would solve them.

In this post, I'll share the top 5 usability issues we identified with migration tools and how we addressed them in Atlas.