Obtaining workflow history from the database

JIRA captures changes on an issue in its "change history". It is pretty easy to find them by going to the Change History tab on the View Issue page.

But often, we would like to find out specific details about the various workflow statuses that an issue has gone through in its lifecycle. Going through the change history and identifying the status changes is a painful task when there are tens of hundreds of changes on an issue. People normally write plugins to get around this or go directly to the database.

Even when it is achieved using plugins, the background logic is to look at the tables in the database. In this recipe, we will look at the tables involved, and writing the SQL query to extract workflow changes for a given issue.

Getting ready

Make sure you have a SQL client installed and configured that will help you to connect to the JIRA database.

How to do it...

Let's perform the following steps to obtain the workflow history from the JIRA database...