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RavenDB MigrationsWhen to execute?
When I am talking about migrations, I am talking about changing the format of documents in production. RavenDB doesn’t have a “schema”, of course, but if your previous version of the application had a Name property for customer, and your new version have FirstName and LastName, you need to have some way of handling that.
Before getting around to discussing how to do this, I want to discuss when. There are basically two types of migrations when you are talking about RavenDB.
Immediate, shutdown – there is a specific cutoff point, in which we will move from v1 to v2. That includes shutting down the application for the duration of the update. The shutdown is required because the v1 application expects to find Name property, the v2 application expects to first FirstName, LastName properties. If you try to run them both at the same time, you can get into a situation where each version of the application is fighting to enforce its own view. So the simplest solution is to shut down the application, convert the data and then start the new version.
Rolling update – your v2 application can handle the v1 format, which means that you can switch from the v1 app to v2 app fairly rapidly, and whenever the v2 application encounters the old format, it will convert it for your to the new one, potentially conserving the old format for a certain period.
I’ll discuss exactly how to handle those in my next post.
More posts in "RavenDB Migrations" series:
- (26 Aug 2011) Rolling Updates
- (25 Aug 2011) When to execute?
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