Using Liquibase with Amazon Redshift

Amazon Redshift is a fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service in the cloud. An Amazon 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 Amazon Redshift engine and contains one or more databases. For more information, see the Amazon Redshift documentation page.

Verified versions

  • Cloud

Verification level

Note: A database's verification level indicates how well it works with different features in Liquibase and across different products, such as Liquibase Open Source and Liquibase Pro. For more information, see Database Verification Levels.

Foundational: Database has been tested and validated to deliver the basic functionality of change management and change tracking aligned with the database. Some additional advanced capabilities may be implemented. The Liquibase customer support team provides how-to/usage support around verified capabilities for commercial customers.

Prerequisites

  1. Introduction to Liquibase – Dive into Liquibase concepts.
  2. Install Liquibase – Download Liquibase on your machine.
  3. Get Started with Liquibase – Learn how to use Liquibase with an example database.
  4. Design Your Liquibase Project – Create a new Liquibase project folder and organize your changelogs
  5. How to Apply Your Liquibase Pro License Key – If you use Liquibase Pro, activate your license.

Install drivers

To use Liquibase and Amazon Redshift, you need two JAR files: JDBC and the Liquibase Redshift extension:

  1. 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.
  2. Go to the liquibase-redshift repository and download the latest released Liquibase extension liquibase-redshift-<version>.jar file.

To use the Liquibase CLI, place your JAR file(s) in the liquibase/lib directory.

If you use Maven, you must instead include the driver JAR as a dependency in your 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>4.27.0</version>
</dependency>

Make sure that the Liquibase plugin and the extension have the same version.

Test your connection

  1. Ensure your Amazon Redshift database is configured. You can check the connection to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
  2. Specify the database URL in the liquibase.properties file (defaults file), along with other properties you want to set a default value for. Liquibase does not parse the URL. You can either specify the full database connection string or specify the URL using your database's standard connection format:
  3. 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>

  1. Create a text file called changelog (.xml, .sql, .yaml, or .json) in your project directory and add a changeset.

    If you already created a changelog using the init project command, you can use that instead of creating a new file. When adding onto an existing changelog, be sure to only add the changeset and to not duplicate the changelog header.

  2. <?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="your.name">
            <createTable tableName="test_table">
                <column name="test_id" type="int">
                    <constraints primaryKey="true" nullable="false" />
                </column>
                <column name="test_column" type="int"/>
            </createTable>
        </changeSet>
    
    </databaseChangeLog>
    --liquibase formatted sql
    
    --changeset your.name:1
    CREATE TABLE test_table (test_id INT NOT NULL, test_column INT, PRIMARY KEY (test_id))

    Tip: Formatted SQL changelogs generated from Liquibase versions before 4.2.0 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: your.name
           changes:
           - createTable:
               tableName: test_table
               columns:
               - column:
                   name: test_id
                   type: INT
                   constraints:
                       primaryKey:  true
                       nullable:  false
               - column:
                   name: test_column
                   type: INT
    {
      "databaseChangeLog": [
        {
          "changeSet": {
            "id": "1",
            "author": "your.name",
            "changes": [
              {
                "createTable": {
                  "tableName": "test_table",
                  "columns": [
                    {
                      "column": {
                        "name": "test_id",
                        "type": "INT",
                        "constraints": {
                          "primaryKey": true,
                          "nullable": false
                        }
                      }
                    },
                    {
                      "column": {
                        "name": "test_column",
                        "type": "INT"
                      }
                    }
                  ]
                }
              }
            ]
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  3. Navigate to your project folder in the CLI and run the Liquibase status command to see whether the connection is successful:
  4. liquibase status --username=test --password=test --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>

    Note: You can specify arguments in the CLI or keep them in the Liquibase properties file.

    If your connection is successful, you'll see a message like this:

    4 changesets have not been applied to <your_connection_url>
    Liquibase command 'status' was executed successfully.
  5. Inspect the deployment SQL with the update-sql command:
  6. liquibase update-sql --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>
  7. Then make changes to your database with the update command:
  8. liquibase update --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>

    If your update is successful, Liquibase runs each changeset and displays a summary message ending with:

    Liquibase: Update has been successful.
    Liquibase command 'update' was executed successfully.
  9. From a database UI tool, ensure that your database contains the test_table object you added along with the DATABASECHANGELOG table and DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK table.

Now you're ready to start making deployments with Liquibase!

Related links