v1.24.0

[kyleconroy]

What's new

Verifying database schema changes

Schema updates and poorly-written queries often bring down production databases. That’s bad.

Out of the box, sqlc generate catches some of these issues. Running sqlc vet with the sqlc/db-prepare rule catches more subtle problems. But there is a large class of issues that sqlc can’t prevent by looking at current schema and queries alone.

For instance, when a schema change is proposed, existing queries and code running in production might fail when the schema change is applied. Enter sqlc verify, which analyzes existing queries against new schema changes and errors if there are any issues.

Let's look at an example. Assume you have these two tables in production.

CREATE TABLE users (
  id UUID PRIMARY KEY
);

CREATE TABLE user_actions (
  id UUID PRIMARY KEY,
  user_id UUID NOT NULL,
  action TEXT,
  created_at TIMESTAMP
);

Your application contains the following query to join user actions against the users table.

-- name: GetUserActions :many
SELECT * FROM users u
JOIN user_actions ua ON u.id = ua.user_id
ORDER BY created_at;

So far, so good. Then assume you propose this schema change:

ALTER TABLE users ADD COLUMN created_at TIMESTAMP;

Running sqlc generate fails with this change, returning a column reference "created_at" is ambiguous error. You update your query to fix the issue.

-- name: GetUserActions :many
SELECT * FROM users u
JOIN user_actions ua ON u.id = ua.user_id
ORDER BY u.created_at;

While that change fixes the issue, there's a production outage waiting to happen. When the schema change is applied, the existing GetUserActions query will begin to fail. The correct way to fix this is to deploy the updated query before applying the schema migration.

It ensures migrations are safe to deploy by sending your current schema and queries to sqlc cloud. There, we run the queries for your latest push against your new schema changes. This check catches backwards incompatible schema changes for existing queries.

Here sqlc verify alerts you to the fact that ORDER BY "created_at" is ambiguous.

$ sqlc verify
FAIL: app query.sql

=== Failed
=== FAIL: app query.sql GetUserActions
    ERROR: column reference "created_at" is ambiguous (SQLSTATE 42702)

By the way, this scenario isn't made up! It happened to us a few weeks ago. We've been happily testing early versions of verify for the last two weeks and haven't had any issues since.

This type of verification is only the start. If your application is deployed on-prem by your customers, verify could tell you if it's safe for your customers to rollback to an older version of your app, even after schema migrations have been run.

Rename upload command to push

We've renamed the upload sub-command to push. We changed the data sent along in a push request. Upload used to include the configuration file, migrations, queries, and all generated code. Push drops the generated code in favor of including the plugin.GenerateRequest, which is the protocol buffer message we pass to codegen plugins.

We also add annotations to each push. By default, we include these environment variables if they are present:

GITHUB_REPOSITORY
GITHUB_REF
GITHUB_REF_NAME
GITHUB_REF_TYPE
GITHUB_SHA

Like upload, push should be run when you tag a release of your application. We run it on every push to main, as we continuously deploy those commits.

MySQL support in createdb

The createdb command, added in the last release, now supports MySQL. If you have a cloud project configured, you can use sqlc createdb to spin up a new ephemeral database with your schema and print its connection string to standard output. This is useful for integrating with other tools. Read more in the managed databases documentation.

Plugin interface refactor

This release includes a refactored plugin interface to better support future functionality. Plugins now support different methods via a gRPC service interface, allowing plugins to support different functionality in a backwards-compatible way.

By using gRPC interfaces, we can even (theoretically) support remote plugins, but that's something for another day.

New Contributors

• @xeraph-dev made their first contribution in Support PostgreSQL CREATE TABLE LIKE #2924
• @bilalmirza74 made their first contribution in fix: typo #2931
• @hawkingrei made their first contribution in build(deps): change github.com/pingcap/tidb/parser to github.com/pingcap/tidb/pkg/parser #2943
• @iamwavecut made their first contribution in Enhance sqlpath.Glob to actually support glob wildcard #2955
• @eduardolat made their first contribution in test: add glob pattern tests to sqlpath.Glob #2995

Full Changelog: v1.23.0...v1.24.0

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This discussion was created from the release v1.24.0.

[iamwavecut]

Hyped to try verify. Is it supposed to replace vet completely, or should be used separately?