Code Outside of the Box

Introducing Horton

What is Horton?

Horton is the simple database migration utility. It’s a little program that does one thing: enables versioning of database schema through SQL based migration scripts.

You’ll find a “getting started guide” in the project’s GitHub repository. Horton is also released through GitHub. You can find and download the latest release from the releases tab.

What does it do?

It may help to read this first: I recently wrote about database versioning with migrations.

Horton handles migrations for schema objects and desired state for “code” like objects (stored procedures, views, etc.). It was written to help apply database change scripts to production servers in a fully predictable and automated fashion (i.e. continuous deployment). It’s grown a number of features in recent years, but has never strayed from its very focused purpose.

Why am I “Introducing” it now at version 4.0?

Horton is actually the latest incarnation of a SQL migration tool I wrote almost seven years ago. The first commit was in September 2009! And even though it was published on GitHub, it was always just an internal tool and I never treated it as a real open source project. But I’m trying to change that.

Versions 1-3 did not strictly follow semantic versioning either. There were few, if any, breaking changes over its lifetime.

For version 4, I decided to rewrite it.

• I rewrote the command line parser. Actually, it uses NDesk.Options which is the best .NET command line parser I know of. The command line arguments are similar, but different. Notably you can execute different COMMANDs from the same tool.
• I redesigned the schema_info table. This is biggest breaking change as it renders the tool entirely incompatible with previous version. There’s an open GitHub issue suggesting how solve this if it becomes a problem (though highly unlikely because not many projects used the old tool!).
• There’s cleaner separation between database specific code and the general horton program code. Data access is all based on ADO.NET, so in theory I should be able to support any provider.

I’d love for folks to give it a try and provide feedback. Enjoy!