Automatic Schema Upgrade

[oxzi]

Internally, we talked about automatic schema upgrades multiple times. The current state of manual schema upgrades are far from perfect from a user's point of view and have resulted in messy situations in the past¹.

I created this issue to collect ideas and to keep the problem on our radar.

There was already #770, but IMO letting Icinga DB just apply any schema upgrade will result in other kinds of errors, as explained there.

In a broader sense, this issue is not Icinga DB-only, but also applies to other daemons with a relational database schema, such as Icinga Notifications.

Footnotes

1. There are multiple reports of forgotten or incorrectly applied upgrades in the community forum. ↩

[lippserd]

If the intention is to apply migrations manually and automatically in a fail-safe manner, I have already drafted something here: https://github.com/lippserd/database-schema-migrations.

Alternatively, we could consider using or implementing something like https://github.com/adlio/schema. However, manually applying schema upgrades would still be prone to errors with such an approach.