Upgrade Guides

Compatibility Policy

Slick requires Scala 2.10 or 2.11. (For Scala 2.9 please use ScalaQuery, the predecessor of Slick).

Slick version numbers consist of an epoch, a major and minor version, and possibly a qualifier (for milestone, RC and SNAPSHOT versions).

For release versions (i.e. versions without a qualifier), backward binary compatibility is guaranteed between releases with the same epoch and major version (e.g. you could use 2.1.2 as a drop-in relacement for 2.1.0 but not for 2.0.0). Slick Extensions requires at least the same minor version of Slick (e.g. Slick Extensions 2.1.2 can be used with Slick 2.1.2 but not with Slick 2.1.1). Binary compatibility is not preserved for slick-codegen, which is generally used at compile-time.

We do not guarantee source compatibility but we try to preserve it within the same major release. Upgrading to a new major release may require some changes to your sources. We generally deprecate old features and keep them around for a full major release cycle (i.e. features which become deprecated in 2.1.0 will not be removed before 2.2.0) but this is not possible for all kinds of changes.

Release candidates have the same compatibility guarantees as the final versions to which they lead. There are no compatibility guarantees whatsoever for milestones and snapshots.

Upgrade from 3.0 to 3.1

This section describes the changes that are needed when upgrading from Slick 3.0 to 3.1. If you are currently using an older version of Slick, please see the older Slick Manuals for details on other changes that may be required.

Deprecations

Most deprecated features from 3.0, including the old Invoker and Executor APIs and the package aliases for scala.slick were removed.

HikariCP

The HikariCP support for Slick was factored out into its own module with a non-optional dependency on HikariCP itself. This makes it easier to use the correct version of HikariCP (which does not have a well-defined binary compatibility policy) with Slick. See the section on dependencies for more information.

Due to packaging constraints imposed by OSGi, HikariCPJdbcDataSource was moved from package slick.jdbc to slick.jdbc.hikaricp.

Counting Option columns

Counting collection-valued queries with .length now ignores nullability of the columns, i.e. it is equivalent to COUNT(*) in SQL, no matter what is being counted. The previous approach of picking a random column led to inconsistent results. This is particularly relevant when you try to count one side of an outer join. Up to Slick 3.0 the goal (although not achieved in all cases due to a design problem) was not to include non-matching rows in the total (equivalent to counting only the discriminator column). This does not make sense anymore for the new outer join operators (introduced in 3.0) with correct Option types. The new semantics are identical to those of Scala collections.

There is a new operator .countDefined for counting only the defined / matching (i.e. non-NULL in SQL) rows. To avoid any ambiguities in the definition, it is only available for collection-valued queries of a single column with an Option type.

Default String type on MySQL

Slick 3.0 changed the default string type for MySQL to TEXT, which is not allowed for primary keys and columns with default values. In these cases we now fall back to the old VARCHAR(254) type which was used up to Slick 2.1. Like in 3.0 you can change this default by setting the application.conf key slick.driver.MySQL.defaultStringType.

Default String type on SQL Server

SQLServerDriver (part of Slick Extensions) used VARCHAR(MAX) as the default type for strings without a size limit in 3.0. This type cannot be used for primary keys, so we now use VARCHAR(254) instead if a column has the PrimaryKey option set. Like for MySQL (see previous paragraph), the default type can be overridden by setting slick.driver.SQLServer.defaultStringType in application.conf.