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Adding Support for Additional Databases

Liquibase is designed to be cross-database and therefore separates the database-specific logic from the overall database-agnostic code. Therefore, the overall process of adding support for a new database is finding and fixing the specific places where the default database interaction logic doesn't work with your database.

This work is broken up into two milestones:

  1. Foundational Support which enables Liquibase to understand your database and get basic update/rollback logic working
  2. Advanced Support which enables "change type" and snapshot-based functionality

In each milestone, you have an end goal of working functionality and have a specific subset of interfaces to implement.

Prerequisites

Implementing support for additional databases requires an understanding of Java. You will be creating classes, overriding methods, and working with inheritance hierarchies.

You will also need to understand how to work with the new database. As you hit places where Liquibase incorrectly assumes particular SQL will work against your database, you will need to know what the correct SQL is.

Finally, this section assumes you are adding support for a SQL-based database. NoSQL and non-relational databases use this exact same process, but there will be more changes to make and you will need to re-implement more complex interfaces. Therefore, to keep this information more streamlined it is only focusing on what needs to be done for relational databases.

Project Setup

If you have not already created a repository to hold your code, see Your First Extension in the Getting Started guide.

Foundational Support

The first milestone is to have Liquibase understand how your database works and be able to run any functionality that depends on user-specified SQL.

Basically "you can run update and rollback using Formatted SQL or the sql change type in xml/yaml/json. You will not be able to use more complex change types like createTable or use snapshot or generateChangelog functionality until you have finished milestone 2

There are three steps in this milestone:

  1. Create a new liquibase.database.Database implementation
  2. Test that Liquibase works with sql-based changelog files
  3. (If step 2 fails) Test and fix failures until there are no more

Advanced Support

At the end of this second milestone, Liquibase works against your database in a large variety of use cases, but it does not support everything Liquibase can do.

By default, the change and snapshot logic uses standard SQL and/or JDBC calls so many will work out of the box, but not enough to advertise support for them until you have ensured they work.

The steps in this phase are:

  1. Configure test harness to determine what needs to be fixed
  2. Iteratively failures from step 1 until there are no more

Next Steps

Congratulations! You can certainly stop here and use all the standard Liquibase functionality against your database.

However, if there is new and unique functionality your database supports, you can always expand beyond Liquibase's standard logic to work with it.

Perhaps your database supports different object types? Add new DatabaseObject classes to your extension and snapshot to see them in diff operations.

Does your database have statements or operations which you would like to wrap in custom Change functions? Add new Change classes to your extension and the SqlGenerator for it.

Any other new functionality can be bundled into your extension, but also think about the scope of the functionality you are adding. If it is truly unique to this database you can certainly add it to this extension, but if it is something that can be used beyond your database it is likely best packaged as an independent exception.

Last update: April 7, 2023
Created: January 9, 2023