Govern database changes

Govern is where you decide what a safe database change means for your organization. Policies are defined and organized in the web application, and enforced by running Liquibase checks commands in your CI/CD pipelines while changes are delivered. The results land in Monitor.

Note: The Govern section appears in the left navigation for your workspace, with two sections Policies and Assignments.

Set up Change Governance in this order

Set up Change Governance for your team walks the whole flow on one page. These are the step-by-step guides behind it, in the order you do them.

1. Bring your policies into the library. Import your existing policy checks if you already run them from a checks settings file, or organize checks and packages to start from the Liquibase Default Catalog. What is in the Liquibase Default Catalog? lists what ships.

2. Define policy assignments to map the packages to the projects, pipelines, and changelogs they govern.

3. Run checks with a policy assignment from your pipeline, and read the result.

4. Tune your policy checks: enable or disable a check, configure a check, customize a built-in check, or create a check.

5. Set policy check severity and exit codes when a check has earned your trust, staged with policy check roll out best practices.

6. Review policy coverage to find what your policies do not reach, then improve governance end to end.

Concepts and reference

• What are policy checks?

• Understand policy governance

• Browse the policy catalog

• Severity and exit codes in policy check automation

• Archive an assignment

Run policy checks

Run checks in your pipeline, against your changelog or against a database snapshot.

• Run policy checks

• Run checks with a policy assignment

• Automatically create a snapshot and run checks

• Manually create a snapshot and run checks

Improve governance

Interpret measurements, decide what to change, adjust policies and practice, and verify the effect.

• Improve governance end to end

• Interpret governance and delivery measurements

• Identify the constraint: Policy, practice, or pipeline

• Decide what to change

• Adjust policies, assignments, and scope

• Adjust development and delivery practice

• Communicate the change to affected teams

• Verify the effect on the next measurement cycle

• Retire controls that no longer earn their cost