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 database versions
- Cloud
Prerequisites
- Introduction to Liquibase: Dive into Liquibase concepts.
- Install Liquibase: Download Liquibase on your machine.
- Ensure Java is installed: Liquibase requires Java to run. If you used the Liquibase Installer, Java is included automatically. Otherwise, you must install Java manually.
- Get Started with Liquibase: Learn how to use Liquibase with an example database.
- Design Your Liquibase Project: Create a new Liquibase project folder and organize your changelogs.
- How to Apply Your Liquibase Pro License Key: If you use Liquibase Pro, activate your license.
Install drivers
CLI users
To use Liquibase and Amazon Redshift, you need two JAR files: JDBC and the Liquibase Redshift extension:
- Download the Amazon Redshift JDBC 4.2–compatible driver that includes AWS SDK driver-dependent libraries from Amazon, and extract the contents of the ZIP file into the Liquibase
/lib
folder. - Go to the liquibase-redshift repository and download the latest released Liquibase extension
liquibase-redshift-<version>.jar
file. The latest JAR is in the "Assets" section of the latest release. Alternatively, download it from Maven Central.
liquibase/lib
directory.
Maven users
To use Liquibase with Maven, pom.xml
file. Using this information, Maven automatically downloads the driver JAR from Maven Central when you build your project.
<dependency>
<groupId>com.amazon.redshift</groupId>
<artifactId>redshift-jdbc42</artifactId>
<version>2.1.0.12</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
<groupId>org.liquibase.ext</groupId>
<artifactId>liquibase-redshift</artifactId>
<version>4.31.1</version>
</dependency>
Make sure that the Liquibase plugin and the database extension have the same version in your POM.
Configure connection
- Ensure your Amazon Redshift database is configured. You can check the connection to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
- 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:
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>
Test connection
-
Create a text file called
changelog
(.sql
,.yaml
,.json
, or.xml
) 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. - Navigate to your project folder in the CLI and run the Liquibase
status
command to see whether the connection is successful: - Inspect the deployment SQL with the
update-sql
command: - Then execute these changes to your database with the
update
command: - From a database UI tool, ensure that your database contains the
test_table
object you added along with the DATABASECHANGELOG table and DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK table.
--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"
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
}
]
}
<?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 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.
liquibase update-sql --changelog-file=<changelog.xml>
If the SQL that Liquibase generates isn't what you expect, you should review your changelog file and make any necessary adjustments.
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.
Now you're ready to start making deployments with Liquibase!

