How do I trim my changelog?

Often the changelog file is so large that it causes performance issues in your editor, or there are too many merge conflicts.

Procedure

The best way to handle this is to divide your changelog file into multiple files.

1

Create a main.changelog.xml file

Instead of having a single changelog.xml file with everything in it, create a main.changelog.xml file which uses the include tag to reference other changelog files.

changelog.xml file example
<databaseChangeLog
  xmlns="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xmlns:ext="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog-ext"
  xmlns:pro="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro"
    xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog
        http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-latest.xsd
        http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog-ext
        http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-ext.xsd
        http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro
        http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/pro/liquibase-pro-latest.xsd">
  <include  file="com/example/news/news.changelog.xml"/>
  <include  file="com/example/directory/directory.changelog.xml"/>
</databaseChangeLog>
2

Run the liquibase update command

When you run liquibase update against the main.changelog.xml file, changesets in com/example/news/news.changelog.xml will run and then the changesets in com/example/directory/directory.changelog.xml will run. You can break up changesets by feature, release, or other ways.