Feature Flagging to Reduce Risk in Database Migrations

I won’t say that feature flagging your database migration will make everything easy, but it will make it easier to test it with real, live data (for a subset of your user base), and much easier to roll it back if something goes wrong. I will explain how you can use feature flags to gradually apply a database migration or schema change, while constantly verifying that the new model passes integrity checks. This ensures that the migration can be applied in a controlled manner, with very little risk.

Pizza and beer will be served!

Patrick is currently the lead engineer at LaunchDarkly. Before that, he was a senior developer at Atlassian where he helped build the Atlassian Marketplace and worked on the Bitbucket team. Patrick worked on the prototype of the first version of the Atlassian Marketplace during one of Atlassian’s ShipIt hackathon days. He has a B.S. in Computer Science from Northeastern University. He is an award-winning home-brewer, and enjoys hiking with his family on the weekends.

About LaunchDarkly:

LaunchDarkly solves the biggest pains around effective continuous delivery, allowing software teams to move faster with less risk. Companies use our feature flag management platform to manage the whole feature lifecycle from launch to sunsetting. Teams have complete control over features at scale allowing them to easily release to specific users, collect feedback, and enable easy rollback. By effectively separating business logic from code, you can build better software, faster.