Using Liquibase with AWS Redshift
Amazon Web Services Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. An AWS Redshift data warehouse is a collection of computing resources called nodes. The nodes are organized into a group called a cluster. Each cluster runs an AWS Redshift engine and contains one or more databases. For more information, see the Amazon Redshift documentation page.
Supported versions
- 3.0.28
Prerequisites
- Install Liquibase.
- Create a Liquibase project folder to store all Liquibase files. You can do this manually or with the init project command.
- Create a new Liquibase properties file or use the
liquibase.properties
file included in the installation package. For more information, see Create and Configure a liquibase.properties File.
Install drivers
To use Liquibase and AWS Redshift, you need two jar files: JDBC and the Liquibase Redshift extension:
- Download the Amazon Redshift JDBC 4.2–compatible driver (without the AWS SDK) from Amazon or Maven. If you use the Amazon Redshift JDBC driver for database authentication, ensure you have AWS SDK for Java 1.11.118 or later in your Java class path. If you don't have AWS SDK for Java installed, download the ZIP file with the JDBC 4.2–compatible driver (without the AWS SDK) and driver dependent libraries for the AWS SDK:
redshift-jdbc<version>.jar
. - Go to the liquibase-redshift repository and download the latest released Liquibase extension
liquibase-redshift-<version>.jar
file.
liquibase/lib
directory.
If you use Maven, pom.xml
file.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.amazon.redshift</groupId>
<artifactId>redshift-jdbc42</artifactId>
<version>2.0.0.4</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.liquibase.ext</groupId>
<artifactId>liquibase-redshift</artifactId>
<version>4.20.0</version>
</dependency>
Make sure that the Liquibase plugin and the extension have the same version.
Test your connection
- Ensure your AWS Redshift database is configured. You can check the connection to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
- Specify the database URL in the Liquibase properties file. Liquibase does not parse the URL. You can either specify the full database connection string or specify the URL using your database's standard JDBC format:
url: jdbc:redshift://endpoint:port/database
Example: url: jdbc:redshift://<cluster-identifier>.us-east-1.redshift.amazonaws.com:5439/databasename
Note: To get your JDBC connection, see Finding your cluster connection string.
Tip: To apply a Liquibase Pro key to your project, add the following property to the Liquibase properties file: licenseKey: <paste code here>
- Create a text file called changelog (
.xml
,.sql
,.json
, or.yaml
) in your project directory and add a changeset. - Navigate to your project folder in the CLI and run the Liquibase status command to see whether the connection is successful:
- Inspect the SQL with the update-sql command. Then make changes to your database with the update command.
- From a database UI tool, ensure that your database contains the
test_table
you added along with the DATABASECHANGELOG table and DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK table.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<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">
<changeSet id="1" author="Liquibase">
<createTable tableName="test_table">
<column name="test_id" type="int">
<constraints primaryKey="true"/>
</column>
<column name="test_column" type="varchar"/>
</createTable>
</changeSet>
</databaseChangeLog>

-- liquibase formatted sql
-- changeset liquibase:1
CREATE TABLE test_table (test_id INT, test_column VARCHAR(256), PRIMARY KEY (test_id))
Tip: Formatted SQL changelogs generated from Liquibase versions before 4.2 might cause issues because of the lack of space after a double dash ( -- ). To fix this, add a space after the double dash. For example: -- liquibase formatted sql
instead of --liquibase formatted sql
and -- changeset myname:create-table
instead of --changeset myname:create-table

databaseChangeLog:
- changeSet:
id: 1
author: Liquibase
changes:
- createTable:
columns:
- column:
name: test_column
type: INT
constraints:
primaryKey: true
nullable: false
tableName: test_table

{
"databaseChangeLog": [
{
"changeSet": {
"id": "1",
"author": "Liquibase",
"changes": [
{
"createTable": {
"columns": [
{
"column":
{
"name": "test_column",
"type": "INT",
"constraints":
{
"primaryKey": true,
"nullable": false
}
}
}]
,
"tableName": "test_table"
}
}]
}
}]
}
liquibase status --username=test --password=test --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>
Note: You can pass arguments in the CLI or keep them in the Liquibase properties file.
liquibase update-sql --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>
liquibase update --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>