Using Liquibase with CockroachDB

The purpose of this document is to guide you through the process of creating a new Liquibase project with CockroachDB. In this tutorial, you will learn how to generate an example project and follow the instructions to apply concepts associated with creating new Liquibase projects with CockroachDB.

Prerequisites

Note: Place your jar file in the Liquibase/lib install directory or in any other known directory so you can locate it easily.

cockroach cert create-client user --certs-dir=certs --ca-key=my-safe-directory/ca.key --also-generate-pkcs8-key

Tutorial

To create a Liquibase project with CockroachDB, perform the following steps:

  1. Create a new project folder and name it LiquibaseCockroachDB.
  2. In your LiquibaseCockroachDB folder, create a new text file and name it liquibase.properties.
  3. Edit the liquibase.properties file to add the following properties:

CockroachDB on-premises sample liquibase.properties file

changeLogFile: dbchangelog.xml
url:jdbc:postgresql://localhost:26257/database?ssl=true&sslmode=require&sslrootcert=/full-path/certs/ca.crt&sslkey=/full-ath/certs/client.user.key.pk8&sslcert=/full-path/certs/client.user.crt
username: user1
password: password
driver: org.postgresql.Driver
classpath: ../../Liquibase_Drivers/postgresql-42.2.8.jar

When using the CockroachDB on-premises and specifying URL, enter your IP address or host name, and then the port followed by the database name. The example of the format is the following: jdbc:postgresql://<IP OR HOSTNAME>:<PORT>/<DATABASE>.

The SSL connection parameters to the full paths of the certificates that you generated are optional.

A key in PKCS#8 format is the standard key encoding format in Java.

CockroachDB cloud sample liquibase.properties file

changeLogFile: dbchangelog.xml
url: jdbc:postgresql://liquibase-3r8.aws-us-east-2.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=liquibase-ca.crt
username: user1
password: password
driver: org.postgresql.Driver
classpath: ../../Liquibase_Drivers/postgresql-42.2.8.jar

When using the CockroachCloud instance and specifying URL, enter a global host name and the port 26257 by referring to the CockroachCloud website. Also, add the database name with the SSL mode and the path to the CA certificate to your URL.

Note: Specifying your password, take into account that Liquibase supports only the following special characters: ~ # $ % * ( ) - _ + [ ] { } . ?. Unsupported special characters are as follows: @ & / : < > " ' ` | ^ ! = , \ <spaces>.

If you placed your jar file in the Liquibase/lib install directory, there is no need to specify the classpath property in the liquibase.properties file. Otherwise, put the path to your driver as it is shown in the preceding example.

If you already have a Liquibase Pro key and want to apply it to your project, add the following property to your liquibase.properties file:

liquibaseProLicenseKey: <paste license key>
  1. In your LiquibaseCockroachDB folder, create a new text file and name it dbchangelog.xml. The changelog files contain a sequence of changesets, each of which makes small changes to the structure of your database.

Note: Instead of creating an empty changelog file, you can use an existing database to generate a changelog. In this tutorial, you will manually add a single change. To add this change, open the XML file and update the changelog file with the following code snippet:

<?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"
          xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog
          http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-3.8.xsd">
  /databaseChangeLog>
  1. Add a changeset to the changelog. The changesets are uniquely identified by author and id. Liquibase attempts to execute each changeset in a transaction that is committed at the end. In the dbchangelog.xml file, add a new department create table changeset as follows:
<?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"
       xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog
              http://www.liquibase.org/xml/ns/dbchangelog/dbchangelog-3.8.xsd">
           <changeSet id="1" author="bob">
             <createTable tableName="department">
                <column name="id" type="int">
                     <constraints primaryKey="true" nullable="false"/>
                </column>
                <column name="name" type="varchar(50)">
                      <constraints nullable="false"/>
                </column>
                <column name="active" type="boolean" defaultValueBoolean="true"/>
                </createTable>
             </changeSet>
</databaseChangeLog>

Note: The preceding changeset is XML format. The corresponding SQL statement looks like the following:

--liquibase formatted sql

--changeset bob:1
CREATE TABLE "DEPARTMENT" ("ID" INTEGER, "NAME" STRING, "ACTIVE" BOOLEAN);
--changeset bob:1
CREATE TABLE public.department (id INTEGER NOT NULL, 
name VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL, 
active BOOLEAN DEFAULT TRUE, 
CONSTRAINT DEPARTMENT_PKEY PRIMARY KEY (id));
  1. Open the command prompt, navigate to the LiquibaseCockroachDB directory, and then run the following command:
liquibase update
  1. From a database UI Tool, check your database changes. You will see a new department; table added to the database. For example:
SELECT * FROM "public"."department";
ID Name Active

NULL

NULL

NULL

Also, you will see two more tables:

DATABASECHANGELOG tracking table. This table keeps a record of all the changesets that were deployed. This way, next time when you deploy again, the changesets in the changelog will be compared with the DATABASECHANGELOG tracking table, and only the new changesets that were not found in the DATABASECHANGELOG will be deployed. You will see that a new row was created in that table with the changeset information we have just deployed. For example:

ID Author Filename Dateexecuted Orderexecuted Exectype MDSum

1

bob

dbchangelog.xml

date&time

1

EXECUTED

checksumvalue

DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK tracking table. This table is used internally by Liquibase to manage access to the changelog table during deployment.

See also

CockroachDB Docs

CockroachCloud Docs

Cockroach CA

Cockroach SQL

CockroachDB's Liquibase Tutorial