Top 10 Findings from Our 2019 Liquibase Community Survey

First, a huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the Liquibase community survey. We had the best turnout ever and really appreciate all of the great input and feedback. We’ve already adjusted our road map to make sure we are building the features that you are asking for. The system works! Here are the top 10 findings from our survey.

1: Most Liquibase users are developers

We’ve learned that most people using Liquibase are coming from development and not from the database side. It’s interesting to understand our users’ backgrounds and what their focus is so that we can help more users get their jobs done easier and faster. Not only that, but it helps us figure out what type of information and analogies might be more useful in the documentation.

2: Liquibase is used by companies of all sizes

It’s fascinating to us to see how well Liquibase can work with different sized teams and for companies both big and small.

Some of the respondents who opted to have a phone conversation with us have told us that Liquibase works great, but there are pain points around managing complex management tasks for really large deployments. We’re looking into options around what we can offer to help with the ecosystem around Liquibase.

3: Preferences for executing Liquibase are pretty clear

Understanding how the community executes Liquibase helps us understand where to invest our time. Maven and the command line are the favorites followed by Spring Boot, and custom shell scripts.

4: The most popular databases to use with Liquibase surprised us

There were some not officially supported (i.e., fully tested and vetted) databases that showed up high on our list and some supported ones that not many people use. It’s definitely time to make sure we’re officially supporting and thoroughly testing the databases the community works with most. We’d like to learn more from you about how you’re using Liquibase with databases like MySQL and MariaDB. Look for a conversation on this topic soon on our subreddit.

5: Understanding your preference for writing change scripts

We asked the community for their preference for writing change scripts (1 being most preferred and 5 being least preferred). We hear you. Yes, many people like using XML, but many Liquibase users prefer SQL. What many people don’t know is that you CAN use plain old SQL with Liquibase. We’ll be focusing on documenting the use of plain SQL better and also improving the overall experience for those that use SQL for change scripts.

6: Most of you are definitely interested in a centralized dashboard

We’ve added creating a dashboard that shows all Liquibase deployments in your organization to our road map! Exciting. We’ll be updating you on our progress here soon.

7: Most of you are using Jenkins for CI

There are a LOT of CI tools out there, but our survey shows most Liquibase users rely on Jenkins. We’d like to begin work on a Jenkins plugin for the community to make it even easier. If you’re interested in using an open source Jenkins plugin for Liquibase, let us know what you’d like to see as part of the plugin. Already make your own version? What should we be aware of? Let us know what you think and join the discussion on our subreddit.

8: We need to continue making our documentation better

We’ve made a ton of improvements recently and plan on making many more to our docs, add video tutorials, and make our getting started information more useful. If you haven’t seen it lately, check out the Documentation section.

Most of the other input we received was about adding or improving integrations and various features. More on that soon.

9: Features that you’d most like to see

Features that are highest in demand are around rolling back a specific change and an easier way to run platform-specific SQL. We’ve added these items to our road map and you’ll be seeing these become reality very soon!

10: Overall, you really like Liquibase

We received a lot of positive feedback from you. It’s exciting and fun to work on a project so many people love and rely on.

Some positive pieces of feedback we wanted to share:

“We use Liquibase in our CI/CD pipeline with Jenkins and it has worked well for us. We have been using SQL versus XML/JSON/YAML as it allows us to use Postgres BDR and PgLogical features that would otherwise have been unavailable.”

– Andy K., Senior Software Architect at ACI Worldwide

“I love using Liquibase. I don’t want to think about doing database releases without it anymore.”

– Anonymous

Liquibase is a great tool that changed the way I managed database changes.”

– A.F., Development Manager

“Fantastic tool.”

– Anonymous

Please keep sending feedback about things you wish were better!