• Concept
  • Version · 5.2.2
  • User guide

How do I manage an offline database?

Last updated: August 12, 2026

If you cannot run Liquibase directly against a database, you can still ensure your database is kept up to date with the commands below.

Running in offline mode only supports update-sql, rollback-sql, tag, and tag-exists directly against the offline database. It does not support direct update or diff against the offline database itself, or preconditions, as there is nothing to actually update or state to check. However, diff and diff-changelog are supported when the offline URL is used as --reference-url with a snapshot= parameter, since the snapshot file provides the state to diff against.

update-sql

The most common way to update offline databases is to use the update-sql functionality against a backup or test database.

The update-sql command reads a database's DATABASECHANGELOG table and outputs the SQL that would run as part of the upgrade. This SQL includes inserts into the DATABASECHANGELOG table and can be ran against any database to both upgrade it and keep its history correct.

It is important that the database you generate the SQL from is the same as the database(s) you plan to run the SQL against.

Unless you have preconditions in your changelog file, the update-sql process only reads the DATABASECHANGELOG table to determine what changesets to run. Therefore if, for example, you have a production database that you cannot run Liquibase against directly and it may be different than your test databases, you can copy or restore just the DATABASECHANGELOG table from the production database into a database you can run update-sql against. Then run the generated SQL against the actual production database.

An offline database is connected by using a URL syntax of offline:DATABASE_TYPE?param1=value1&aparam2=value2.

Available parameters

Attribute

Description

changeLogFile

Specify the file acting as the DATABASECHANGELOG table. Defaults to databasechangelog.csv in the working directory.

version

Specify the database version to ensure generated SQL matches target database version. Example: 5.4.2 or 12.1.0.3

productName

Specify "product name" seen by the JDBC driver.

catalog

Specify the connection catalog

caseSensitive

Specify if the database is case sensitive or not

outputLiquibaseSql

If set to true, output from update-sql will include create/insert statements for the DATABASECHANGELOG table. Defaults to false.

snapshot

Specify a JSON snapshot file to use as the database state for offline diff and diff-changelog operations. Used as --reference-url=offline:DATABASE_TYPE?snapshot=your_snapshot_file to compare against an offline snapshot.

sendsStringParametersAsUnicode

Specify whether string parameters are sent to the database as Unicode. Accepts true or false.

Examples

  • offline:oracle

  • offline:mssql?changeLogFile=/src/changelog.csv

  • offline:mysql?version=5.4.21&changeLogFile=/src/changelog.csv

  • liquibase diff-changelog --reference-url=offline:postgresql?snapshot=/src/my-database-snapshot.json

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