Liquibase lock - reasons?

It is not mentioned which environment is used for executing Liquibase. In case it is Spring Boot 2 it is possible to extend liquibase.lockservice.StandardLockService without the need to run direct SQL statements which is much cleaner. E.g.:

/**
 * This class is enforcing to release the lock from the database.
 *
 */
 public class ForceReleaseLockService extends StandardLockService {

    @Override
    public int getPriority() {
        return super.getPriority()+1;
    }

    @Override
    public void waitForLock() throws LockException {
        try {
            super.forceReleaseLock();
        } catch (DatabaseException e) {
            throw new LockException("Could not enforce getting the lock.", e);
        }
        super.waitForLock();
    }
}

The code is enforcing the release of the lock. This can be useful in test setups where the release call might not get called in case of errors or when the debugging is aborted.

The class must be placed in the liquibase.ext package and will be picked up by the Spring Boot 2 auto configuration.

Liquibase 4

Note that the extension loading mechanism has changed in Liquibase 4.

Now a file under META-INF/services with the implemented full interface package name must be created and in this file all extension must be listed.

This could mean that in META-INF/services/liquibase.lockservice.LockService

This line must be added:

com.company.liquibase.impl.ForceReleaseLockService

I have not tried it, still using Liquibase 3, please edit and correct.

The problem was the buggy implementation of SequenceExists in Liquibase. Since the changesets with these statements took a very long time and was accidently aborted. Then the next try executing the liquibase-scripts the lock was held.

  <changeSet author="user" id="123">
    <preConditions onFail="CONTINUE">
      <not><sequenceExists sequenceName="SEQUENCE_NAME_SEQ" /></not>
    </preConditions>
    <createSequence sequenceName="SEQUENCE_NAME_SEQ"/>
  </changeSet>

A work around is using plain SQL to check this instead:

  <changeSet author="user" id="123">
    <preConditions onFail="CONTINUE">
            <sqlCheck expectedResult="0">
              select count(*) from user_sequences where sequence_name = 'SEQUENCE_NAME_SEQ';
            </sqlCheck>
    </preConditions>
    <createSequence sequenceName="SEQUENCE_NAME_SEQ"/>
  </changeSet>

Lockdata is stored in the table DATABASECHANGELOCK. To get rid of the lock you just change 1 to 0 or drop that table and recreate.

Edit june 2020

Don't follow this advice. It's caused trouble to many people over the years. It worked for me a long time ago and I posted it in good faith, but it's clearly not the way to do it. The DATABASECHANGELOCK table needs to have stuff in it, so it's a bad idea to just delete everything from it without dropping the table.

Leos Literak, for instance, followed these instructions and the server failed to start.

Original answer

It's possibly due to a killed liquibase process not releasing its lock on the DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK table. Then,

DELETE FROM DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK;

might help you.

Edit: @Adrian Ber's answer provides a better solution than this. Only do this if you have any problems doing his solution.

Sometimes if the update application is abruptly stopped, then the lock remains stuck.

Then running

UPDATE DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK SET LOCKED=0, LOCKGRANTED=null, LOCKEDBY=null where ID=1;

against the database helps.

You may also need to replace LOCKED=0 with LOCKED=FALSE.

Or you can simply drop the DATABASECHANGELOGLOCK table, it will be recreated.