Liquibase launches Secure 6.0 with new governance tools

Liquibase has launched Liquibase Secure 6.0, adding new controls for database change governance across enterprise software delivery.

The release introduces Change Intelligence, a feature designed to give organisations a central view of database changes across applications, pipelines, teams and environments. It also adds a graphical interface for policy management, role-based access control, and more than 50 prebuilt policy rules.

The update reflects a broader challenge for large technology teams as software release cycles accelerate and AI tools increase the volume of code and database changes. In many organisations, database governance remains fragmented, with rules and approvals spread across separate pipelines, repositories and configuration files.

Liquibase said the new version is designed to move database governance from a pipeline-by-pipeline model to a more centralised approach. This allows engineering, security and compliance teams to track what changed, whether a change met policy requirements, and who has authority over the rules.

Change visibility

At the centre of the release is Change Intelligence, a new layer that brings together deployment activity, environment status, policy outcomes, failures, drift and change history. The goal is to reduce the manual work often required when database teams must reconstruct incidents from logs, tickets and screenshots spread across multiple tools.

The feature is intended to help teams identify where risk is building across environments and highlight which changes need attention. If a deployment fails, the system uses AI-driven analysis to explain what happened and suggest remediation steps.

That remediation focus reflects another pressure point for enterprise teams. As development speeds increase, operations groups and database administrators may have to review growing numbers of changes while still maintaining audit records and policy controls for production systems.

Change Intelligence also creates a structured audit trail of database changes throughout the delivery lifecycle. That record is aimed at engineering, security and compliance teams that need evidence of how changes were introduced and managed.

Policy controls

The release also adds a new graphical interface for policy management. Rather than relying on command-line tools or localised pipeline configuration, teams can create, organise and apply policies from one place.

The software includes more than 50 prebuilt rules based on Liquibase's work with large enterprise customers. Those rules can be grouped into reusable policy packages and applied across different applications and environments.

The update also formalises exception handling. When a team needs to make an exception to an existing policy, the software is designed to let that exception be scoped, documented and tied to an audit history, rather than handled informally outside the governance process.

That may appeal to companies trying to balance standardisation with the reality that not every application or data product follows the same operating patterns. A rigid governance model can slow delivery, while an ad hoc one can leave gaps in oversight.

Separation of duties

Liquibase Secure 6.0 also introduces role-based access control over policies, assignments, exceptions and governed assets. The feature is intended to separate those who define governance standards from those who deliver application and data changes within them.

For larger organisations, that separation can be important for internal controls. Development teams may retain autonomy over delivery, while platform, database, security and compliance functions keep authority over the rules.

Pete Pickerill, Co-founder at Liquibase, said the growth of AI-assisted development is increasing the scale of the database governance problem.

"AI is dramatically increasing the volume of application and database change enterprises produce. Governance has to become a force multiplier for that innovation, not the thing that slows it down," said Pete Pickerill, Co-founder at Liquibase.

He said the new release is intended to put controls in place earlier in the process.

"With Liquibase Secure 6.0, organizations can establish the rules once, automate how they are enforced, and give teams more freedom to move quickly because the right controls are already in place," said Pickerill.

The company positions the release as relevant not only to AI-led software development but also to more conventional enterprise delivery models. Liquibase said its Secure product supports more than 65 database platforms, giving customers a single governance layer across mixed database estates.

That matters in large organisations where application portfolios often span legacy systems, cloud databases and newer data products, each with different teams and deployment methods. In that kind of environment, governance tools embedded in individual pipelines can become difficult to manage consistently at scale.

Liquibase Secure 6.0 is generally available and includes Change Intelligence, the new policy management interface, role-based access control, governed exception management and 50 prebuilt policy rules.