Flyway Database Migration

Flyway is an open source database migration tool developed by Red Gate Software, now branded as Redgate Flyway. In continual development since 2010, it has become the industry standard for database versioning and deployment using plain SQL scripts. The tool supports over 50 database platforms including Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, CockroachDB, Google BigQuery, ClickHouse, Cassandra, SQLite, and IBM DB2. Flyway employs a convention-over-configuration approach where migration scripts follow a standard naming convention and are automatically discovered on the filesystem or classpath. Each migration can be either a versioned SQL script, a repeatable script that re-executes when its checksum changes, or a Java-based migration for complex data transformations. The tool maintains a schema history table in the database to track applied migrations, their execution times, and checksums for detecting unauthorized changes. Flyway supports parallel migration execution in cluster environments, ensuring that only one machine applies migrations while others wait. The tool integrates with CI/CD pipelines through its command-line interface, Java API, Maven plugin, and Gradle plugin, enabling database changes to be deployed automatically alongside application code. Spring Boot includes built-in Flyway support for auto-running migrations on application startup.