In my articles, I often discuss the possibilities offered by Ecto. I admire how it is well prepared and how many possibilities it offers.
This time I would like to touch briefly on how migrations work. More precisely how, it is guaranteed that only one server will make changes to the database (with DB migrations).
Understand migrations
Migrations are performed one file after the other.
Ecto uses the schema_migrations table, which stores all migrations that have already been executed.
We can configure this table’s name with the :migration_source in Ecto configuration options.
To ensure that the migration is performed once, Ecto will lock the schema_migrations table when running migrations.
Based on docs, we can see that Ecto leverages this SHARE UPDATE EXCLUSIVE lock as a way to ensure that only one instance is running a migration at a time and only once.
In the end, you will only have the migration applied once!
The table stores the version and inserted_at columns.
There is no storing of checksums.
It is crucial because it allows us to modify and improve already created files.