Evaluating Atlas
Who is this guide for?
Developers, architects, and DevOps engineers evaluating Atlas for their database schema management.
What is Atlas?
Like Terraform, but for databases. Atlas is a language-agnostic tool for managing and migrating database schemas using modern DevOps principles. It supports PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, SQL Server, ClickHouse, Redshift, Oracle, Snowflake, Databricks, CockroachDB, Spanner, and more.
What Atlas manages
Atlas manages the state of a database as code and plans the SQL that brings a database to that state. The code can be Atlas HCL, plain SQL, or the models of an ORM you already use, such as EF Core, SQLAlchemy, Django, Prisma, Drizzle, or GORM. Sources can be combined, for example tables from the ORM and views and functions in SQL. The same workflow covers:
- Schema: tables, indexes, views, functions, triggers, and other objects.
- Roles and permissions: users, roles, and grants, planned and applied like schema.
- Reference data: lookup tables and feature flags declared alongside the schema and reconciled in every environment.
- Migration linting and schema policies: destructive changes, locks, and your own rules, caught on the pull request.
- Testing: database logic tested like any other code, as unit or integration tests.
- Data Scripts: backfills, re-keys, and other data changes as reviewed, tested scripts.
- Drift detection: a check before every apply, and
atlas migrate drifton a schedule. - Atlas Registry: the system of record for migrations and deployments across environments.
What's in this guide?
- Installation - Install Atlas and connect to your database.
- Setting Up - Choose a workflow, configure your project, define your schema as code, and set up migrations.
- Schema Change Workflow - Edit your schema, generate or plan a migration, review, and apply.
- Setup CI/CD - Lint and validate on every PR, deploy on merge via GitHub Actions, GitLab, Kubernetes, Terraform, and more.
- Advanced Topics - Security as code, AI tools, testing, custom rules, schema ownership, lineage, drift detection, and multi-tenant support.
Need help?
If you are evaluating Atlas for commercial use, you may be eligible for free PoC support from the Atlas team, including a dedicated Slack Connect channel.