Show HN: PgRebase, codebase management for Postgres
github.com
github.com
I've been playing a lot with postgresql lately, writing custom functions, views, types, etc.
I find it cool, especially regarding performances. But one thing was annoying me: migrations.
When I wanted to edit an existing function, changing its parameters, I would have to retrieve the function in my generated structure.sql file, generate two migration files (up and down), paste the function in the down file, paste it again in the up file, copy the signature in a drop function statement, edit the function, then copy the new signature in a drop statement in the down file. This was painful.
With pgrebase, you can just write your pg codebase as pure files, and have pgrebase watch them. Any change will be instantly loaded in the database. A non watch mode can be called on deployment, after your usual migration steps, to sync your codebase.
Let me know what you think!
Then, if you want to be able to revert your change, you also need to write a down migration, having a `DROP FUNCTION` with the exact same signature than your new function, and a `CREATE FUNCTION` that recreates the old one.
This is exactly the pain point my root comment describes and which pgrebase solves :)
Why do we use migration tools?
Data is the most important thing for a business. You can loose your code and recreate it. If you loose your data, your business is basically done. Yet, your code often needs change in your database structure. So you write sql in files to describe those changes, because we can't just drop all tables and recreate them on each deploy, we have to preserve data.
It is not really efficient to "just drop sql files in your codebase", because database does not live in that codebase, and you can't be sure databases on all your installations, locals and servers, are up to date. Plus, you can't just load those files in any order, there is an order to be respected. For that reason, we use timestamped up migrations files.
But then, it means that full code related to a given table does not live in a specific and dedicated file. Should you want to revert the change (especially common in dev env), how would you do? For that reason, next to up migration files, we have down migration files.
All of this works just fine, but it has ultimately a single purpose: syncing schema without loosing data.
If you want to manage functions in that context, it will be painful. Postgresql won't allow you to replace a function if its signature doesn't exactly match. That is, you can't change a function signature, you have to first drop it, then recreate it. With migrations, this means that when you're migrating up, you need to drop the old function and create the new one ; and when you're migrating down, you have to drop the new function and recreate the old one.
Remember of how the purpose of this is to not loose data? Well, you can drop all your functions and recreate them, you won't lose any data. This means you can store them in dedicated files, which means you can revert files individually. So, this is what pgrebase is doing : managing all your non data altering pg code so that it's not needlessly painful to use.
Having said that, the dependency management here will have to get better before I could consider it.
You can specify dependencies for files using require statement, provided those files are of the same kind. That is, function files can specify dependencies on other function files, type files can define dependencies on other type files, etc.
This alone is a show stopper for me.
Say I have a table (ignore formatting and other formalities):
CREATE TABLE test_table (id uuid primary key, test_val text, test_val_num numeric);
Now I need a PL/pgSQL function as so....
CREATE FUNCTION testfunc() RETURNS VOID AS $BODY$ DECLARE myTestRec test_table; BEGIN [do stuff] END; $BODY$
My function declares the myTestRec variable to be of type test_table which means for the create function statement to work, the test_table table must exist first. But I cannot, according to the documentation, express or depend that the dependency will be recognized and enforced. Lack of more fluid dependency management would be a show stopper for me.
I like that this tool is implemented in Go; the tool that I use which has this sort of approach is Sqitch (http://sqitch.org/) and I hate the perl dependencies that need to be fulfilled to get it to install. But couldn't leave it for something like this until a greater number of scenarios are supported.
[Edit for clarity]
You're totally right that the dependency graph handler is extremely crude, I wrote it in one evening because I had functions depending on other functions and this caused my import to fail. The dependency statements only exist to fix that, for now, and that's indeed where I think there'll be the most work to do.
You're also right that you still need a migration tool to manage tables schema. I did not intend to replace migration tools, actually, I'm satisfied with them as far as dropping/creating table and adding/removing columns are concerned. The focus of PgRebase is to manage pure non data altering code, which you may edit a lot and this is what migration tools are not good at. The codebase managed is flushed and recreated at will, I didn't want to manage anything that would risk data loss. During deployment, pgrebase is expected to be called after migrations: first you migrate your data, then pgrebase regenerate the non data code.
Something that I probably should add in the documentation: the fact that a code kind can only require an other code kind should not be a problem because of the order they are processed. First, pgrebase processes all custom types, then views, then functions, then triggers. Usually, triggers depends on functions (thus, they're already there), functions can use views or types (already there), etc.
The rule of thumb is: if it's something you're editing a lot and that can be dropped and created without data loss, then its place is in pgrebase.
Also remember in PostgreSQL, views and tables are de facto custom types which are created at table/view create time implicitly; not at custom type create time. If PgRebase processes object kinds strictly in the order you say: what you are really saying is that PgRebase can only support a certain subset of PostgreSQL database designs. An example would be if I have a table where a column is DEFAULT myfunction('default_cust_type'), there I need the function before the table... if I have a view which retrieves a the output of a function (maybe at the top in a CTE)... now I need the function before the view... if that function also relies on table_a as a type, I need table_a -> function -> view... you can't just assume that the object types are always in a certain order and it will be all OK. As a design decision... that won't work for a number of databases.
I would strongly advise you to build your dependency model on file references rather than on PostgreSQL object kinds. This way you don't need to worry about what objects are permitted to depend on another (since this can be quite fluid) and rely on the user of your tool to manage the dependencies. With that approach you don't loose the structural file organization that you are aiming for now while allowing database developers to be in control of the deployment process.
Until now I was more investigating the native extension mechanism of PostgreSQL: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/extend-extens.... But I totally get that a more ad-hoc and versatile solution can be more fitted.
Don't be to rude because it's really minimalist, I actually just published this afternoon my first tiny test on GitHub here : https://github.com/MarHoff/Test
So i definitively had to say Hi there ;)
PostgreSQL 9.6 added extension function pushdown as a new feature allowing functions to be executed on the remote side as long as the extension is registered with the foreign server. This avoids having to fetch all the data from the remote side to execute a function locally, see https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/postgres-fdw....