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0032: Redshift Permissions Management Tooling

STATUS​

Accepted

CONTEXT​

The new data warehouse (aa-warehouse) is built using an Infrastructure-as-Code design. All changes to the database and its metadata can be performed via a PR to the data-warehouse repository. This is achieved via custom lambda-backed CDK resources. Database resources that are created this way include databases, schemas, users, roles, and grants.

We have found the permission granting process to be too coarse and difficult to use. The lambda is only designed to grant a role all privileges on a given subject object (schema, database). In practice, we find ourselves needing to grant more refined permissions (SELECT only for example), and permissions at the table level. Neither of which is supported in the current implementation. Additionally, we have run into intermittent race conditions in code pipeline deployments of the current grant implementation. All of this has resulted in several permissions granted manually and tracked in this github issue.

The objective of this ADR is to establish an Infrastructure-as-Code like solution for managing fine grained permission grants. As an added bonus some solutions may provide for schema migration tracking that is not currently available in our warehouse.

Considered Options​

  1. Continue to manually provision grants.
  2. Enhance the CDK code to handle fine grained granting.
  3. DECISION Adopt Liquibase for managing grants.

DECISION​

We will adopt option 3, implementing Liquibase as our database migration management tool. This will allow us to not only manage grants, but also handle future table management tasks.

Tools also considered:​

CONSEQUENCES​

Permissions and Users​

There will be a new directory migrations in the root of the data-warehouse repository that will house all liquibase resources. Within this directory are the changelog files for each database.

data-warehouse/
├── README.md
├── ...
├── migrations
│   ├── changelog-adaction_analysis.yaml
│   ├── changelog-adaction_raw.yaml
│   ├── changelog-adgem_analysis.yaml
│   ├── changelog-adgem_raw.yaml
│   ├── changelog-cosmic_analysis.yaml
│   ├── changelog-cosmic_raw.yaml
│   ├── changelog-servicehub_analysis.yaml
│   └── changelog-servicehub_raw.yaml
├── ...

All permissions grants will be managed via the changelog for the applicable database.

Example grant changelog entries:

databaseChangeLog:
  - changeSet:
      id: 1
      author: ronco
      labels: raw-sql
      context: example-context
      comment: 
      changes:
        - sql:
            sql: "GRANT SELECT ON TABLE svv_table_info TO ROLE foobar"
  - changeSet:
      id: 2
      author: other-dev
      labels: raw-sql
      context: example-context
      comment: example-comment
      changes:
        - sql:
            sql: "GRANT SELECT ON TABLE foo TO 'foobar'"

Example user creation changelog entries:

databaseChangeLog:
  - changeSet:
      id: 1
      author: ronco
      labels: raw-sql
      context: example-context
      comment: 
      changes:
        - sql:
            sql: "CREATE USER 'foo-user' WITH PASSWORD DISABLE;"

Tables and Views​

One big benefit of using Liquibase is migration management for tables and views. Currently, many of the non-dbt created tables in the data warehouse are created via CREATE IF NOT EXIST statements in the scripts that use them. Additionally, there is no mechanism for modifying table structures, so columns are added manually in the database, and the CREATE IF NOT EXIST statement in the script is often left behind. Worse, the materialized views we have wrapped around federated queries were generated by hand in a sql editor.

There will be a new directory migrations in the root of the airflow-dags repository that will house all liquibase resources. airflow-dags is the primary repo for all new data warehouse logic.

airflow-dags/
├── README.md
├── ...
├── migrations
│   ├── changelog-adaction_analysis.yaml
│   ├── changelog-adaction_raw.yaml
│   ├── changelog-adgem_analysis.yaml
│   ├── changelog-adgem_raw.yaml
│   ├── changelog-cosmic_analysis.yaml
│   ├── changelog-cosmic_raw.yaml
│   ├── changelog-servicehub_analysis.yaml
│   └── changelog-servicehub_raw.yaml
├── ...

Example of creating and modifying a table with liquibase changelog:

- changeSet:
      id:  1
      author:  your.name
      labels: example-label
      context: example-context
      comment: example-comment
      changes:
       - createTable:
            tableName:  person
            columns:
              - column:
                  name:  id
                  type:  int
                  autoIncrement:  true
                  constraints:
                    primaryKey:  true
                    nullable:  false
              - column:
                  name:  name
                  type:  varchar(50)
                  constraints:
                    nullable:  false
              - column:
                  name:  address1
                  type:  varchar(50)
              - column:
                  name:  address2
                  type:  varchar(50)
              - column:
                  name:  city
                  type:  varchar(30)
- changeSet:
      id:  1
      author:  your.name
      labels: example-label
      context: example-context
      comment: example-comment
      changes:
       - addColumn:
            tableName:  person
            columns:
              - column:
                  name:  country
                  type:  varchar(2)

Example of creating a materialized view via changelog sql statements:

- changeSet:
      id: 3
      author: ronco
      labels: materialized_view
      changes:
        - sql:
          sql: >
            CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW prod_mirror.app_campaign_blacklist
            AS
            select id, blacklisted_app_id, campaign_id, created_at, updated_at
            from adgem_prod.app_campaign_blacklist
        - sql:
          sql: >
            CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW prod_mirror.app_campaign_whitelist
            AS
            select id, whitelisted_app_id, campaign_id, created_at, updated_at
            from adgem_prod.app_campaign_whitelist
        - sql:
          sql: >
            CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW prod_mirror.target_devices
            AS
            select id, targeting_profile_id, logic, type, regex, created_at, updated_at, value
            from adgem_prod.target_devices
        - sql:
          sql: >
            CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW prod_mirror.target_isps
            AS select id, isp_id, targeting_profile_id, created_at, updated_at
            from adgem_prod.target_isps
        - sql:
          sql: >
            CREATE MATERIALIZED VIEW prod_mirror.isps
            AS select id, isp_name, country_id
            from adgem_prod.isps
      rollback:
        - sql:
          sql: DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW IF EXISTS prod_mirror.app_campaign_blacklist
        - sql:
          sql: DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW IF EXISTS prod_mirror.app_campaign_whitelist
        - sql:
          sql: DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW IF EXISTS prod_mirror.target_devices
        - sql:
          sql: DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW IF EXISTS prod_mirror.target_isps
        - sql:
          sql: DROP MATERIALIZED VIEW IF EXISTS prod_mirror.isps

Changeset updates​

Liquibase tracks applied changes in the databasechangelog table, and has a lock in databasechangeloglock to ensure no more than one update is running at a given time.

To run un-applied changes you simply execute liquibase update in the directory with your changelog.

Rollbacks​

Liquibaser performs updates in a transaction, so if there is any issue with executing an update (syntax error perhaps), the entire update will be rolled back automatically.

If you've made a change successfully, but need to revert it, this is possible as liquibase tracks all events in the databasechangelog table. Generatlly it is prefered to "roll forward" and maintain the record of the bad change. However, there may be scenarios (including in CI/CD detailed below) where you need to manually rollback.

Changeset automation​

We will set up a new Github action in the data-warehouse and airflow-dags repositories to automatically apply liquibase changes on merge to the main branch as part of our deploy process. When making database updates, merely add your changeset to the changelog for the appropriate database and then merge your PR. Github will take care of running the migration.

Process​

If there is a modification to the changeset file for a given database as part of the push, this action will initially attempt the update on the staging environment database. On failure the deploy will halt. If the deploy is successful in staging the action will perform the update in the production database. If this fails, the deploy will halt, and the changes that were already applied to the staging environment will be rolled back to keep the environments in sync.

The Action​

Since we have distinct changelogs for each database, we need to detect and deploy changes independently for each db, and halt the deploy if any Liquibase error occurs on any db. Here is a visualization of the new deploy database action with a subset of the databases:

Using in dev​

There are a few steps necessary to test/build your migrations in your dev schema.

Liquibase setup​

You'll need to install Liquibase to start.

Additionally, we need two jar files to enable Liquibase to connect to Redshift. Run the following command to download the dependencies:

curl -L -o redshift-jdbc42-2.1.0.18.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/redshift-downloads/drivers/jdbc/2.1.0.18/redshift-jdbc42-2.1.0.18.jar
curl -L -o liquibase-redshift-4.30.0.jar https://github.com/liquibase/liquibase-redshift/releases/download/v4.30.0/liquibase-redshift-4.30.0.jar

Once you have the jars you'll need to set some environment variables:

  • LIQUIBASE_COMMAND_URL -> The jdbc connect string for the database. In our case this is jdbc:redshift://aa-warehouse.ct5xde6dfdjh.us-east-2.redshift.amazonaws.com:5439/de_sandbox
  • LIQUIBASE_COMMAND_USERNAME -> Username for connecting to the db. Should be something along the lines of IAMA:rwhite@adaction.com
  • LIQUIBASE_COMMAND_PASSWORD -> Temporary password for your user.

The username and password can be obtained by running get-cluster-credentials.

Personal changelog​

Create a new changelog for your user schema in the migrations directory. For example migrations/changelog-rwhite.yaml. It's a wise idea to start with a simple migration to test functionality. Here is a simple starter changelog:

databaseChangeLog:
- changeSet:
      id:  1
      author:  ronco
      labels: test
      context: test
      comment: test comment
      changes:
       - createTable:
            tableName:  person
            schemaName: rwhite
            columns:
              - column:
                  name:  name
                  type:  varchar(50)
                  constraints:
                    nullable:  false
              - column:
                  name:  address1
                  type:  varchar(50)
              - column:
                  name:  address2
                  type:  varchar(50)
              - column:
                  name:  city
                  type:  varchar(30)

This will create a dummy person table in your schema. Be sure to update the schema name from rwhite to your own schema.

Run the dev command​

Once you have your dependencies, your environment, and your personal changelog you're ready to run liquibase:

liquibase update --changelog-file migrations/changelog-rwhite.yaml --classpath redshift-jdbc42-2.1.0.18.jar:liquibase-redshift-4.30.0.jar --liquibase-schema-name rwhite

Make sure to update to the correct changelog, schema, and path to jars.

Back populating​

We will be managing all of these database aspects with liquibase going forward, but what will we do about database manipulation that has already occured, either through cdk, or manual application?

The easiest path forward is to recreate all idempotent operations (grants) as liquibase changesets. We will leave all pre-existing non-idempotent changes (user creations) alone.

Risks​

All three of the considered tools are intended for managing DDL, not permissions. They all have support for arbitrary sql instructions, so managing grants and ussers is possible. Nevertheless, we are bending these tools outside of their standard use.

Some database migrations are time and CPU intensive. Firing migrations that add a column to a very large table within a CI/CD event could cause database performance issues.

NOTES​

References​

Original Author​

Ron White

Approval date​

September 8, 2025

Approved by​

Ben Giese Victor Gonzalez

Appendix​