Article

Ahjo – help managing databases

Often the biggest challenges in database management are object versioning and multiple, differing environments. Problems can also arise, for example, when database development is concentrated on a single server and there are multiple developers doing overlapping development.

ALM Partners wanted to provide a tool for database development and management that would support schema and object versioning, streamline collaboration between developers, and thus facilitate overall database management and development. This is how Ahjo was born.

In Ahjo, the problem of managing database schemas has code-driven solution. Code-driven database development is remarkably efficient and transparent, and it also encourages the overall test-driven development process.

A lightweight Alembic database migrator was selected to manage the schema, which utilizes a Python package called SQL Alchemy. Both are open source products. Databases are much more than just a bunch of tables: a database can also include views, procedures, and functions that database migrators do not take a position on.

The benefits of Ahjo are that it’s

  • Written with Python
  • Available from the Python Package Index
  • Based on supported open source libraries
  • Together with version control (Git) makes development transparent and trackable
  • Enables effective collaboration
  • It’s free

ALM Partners uses open source in its products, so that both ideas and implementations are openly visible to everyone and can also be utilized. Thanks to open source, development is never under the control of just one company, but at the best of the global community. Anyone can participate in the development and software bugs can be quickly found and corrected. This often results in high quality, good security and well-functioning software. That is why we at ALM Partners also want to support open source use and act responsibly as part of development.

Ahjo is based on open source and the basic functionality is individually customizable. Ahjo can be easily modified on individual database projects to have additional functionality.

The Ahjo is also lightweight and easily accessible to everyone.

You can download it now for free from:

GitHub

PyPI