rollback-to-date

The rollback-to-date command reverts your database to the state it was in at the date and time you specify.

Uses

The rollback-to-date command is mainly used when you want to revert all changes made to your database from today's date to the date and time you specify. The rollback-to-date command reverts those changesets to their previous state and allows you to target the date and time without impacting changes or deployments that came before the date and time you specified.

The image below shows four deployments performed at a different times: March, April, May, and February. Let's imagine that your current month is May and you want to roll back your database to March.

As you can see, the rollback-to-date command allows you to target deployment 2 performed on March 07, 2020 10:15 AM and revert all changes associated with deployments 4 through 2, to March without impacting the previous deployments—deployment 2 and 1.

Note: There are several ways to revert your changes with the rollback-to-date command. You can use YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS or YYYY-MM-DD'T'HH:MM:SS formats to specify both date and time. Also, you can specify date or time only.

The impacts of rollback-to-date

The use of rollback-to-date comes with risk of removing all changes from today's date to the date you specified. Also, there is an additional impact to the DATABASECHANGELOG table. When any change is rolled back, the row associated with that change is deleted from the DATABASECHANGELOG table. For this reason, look for unintended consequences before using this command.

It is a best practice is to run the rollback-to-date-sql helper command because it allows you to inspect the rollback-to-date SQL and search for any potential mistakes before you execute the rollback-to-date command.

Running the rollback-to-date command

Before running the rollback-to-date command, run the history command to see the dates of all your previous changes.

To run the rollback-to-date command, specify the driver, classpath, and URL in the Liquibase properties file. For more information, see Specifying Properties in a Connection Profile. You can also specify these properties in your command line.

Then run the rollback-to-date command:

liquibase --changelog-file=sample.changelog.xml rollback-to-date 2020-05-07

Note: Enter the name of the changelog and date that you want to use in place of sample.changelog.xml and 2020-05-07.

rollback-to-date global attributes

Attribute	Definition	Requirement
--changelog-file *	The root changelog	Required
--url	The JDBC database connection URL	Required
--username	The database username	Required
--password	The database password	Required

* Liquibase will check nested changelogs for definitions of the changesets to rollback.

Note: The username and password attributes are not required for connections and systems which use alternate means of authentication.

rollback-to-date command attributes

Attribute	Definition	Requirement
--date/time	The date and time your database rolls back to. The date format is YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS or YYYY-MM-DD'T'HH:MM:SS, however, it is possible to indicate the date or time only.	Required