It is essential to treat database schema as source code and apply all the norms and best practices applicable to it. From what I hear and read, database schema version control is non-existent in too many projects.
Various techniques to accomplish version control of database schemas have been discussed and published. Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadagale has written a comprehensive article on Evolutionary Database Design. It is a must-read for everyone involved with database development.
K. Scott Allen writes in detail about an excellent system here - Versioning Databases - Change Scripts. This approach is sufficiently light-weight (for my taste) and provides complete control over the whole process.
I am providing a free tool here that you can use to implement this system. It will even create the SchemaVersionsLog table for your database, if it doesn’t exist. If you are using this tool with MSSQL Server, you can get started with very little effort. If you are using a different DBMS, you can still use this tool. It uses NHibernate to access the SchemaVersionsLog table. So, any DBMS supported by NHibernate is acceptable, as long as it comes with a command line tool to execute the sql scripts.
Download DbUpdater here.
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Comments 4
Hello,
I’ve tried the tool and it runs forever after it says “executing baseline.sql”. I’m running it against a sql2000 server and a 400kb baseline.sql.
Any ideas why?
Thanks
Posted 25 Jun 2008 at 1:43 am ¶Interesting tool…I’m trying to implement this at my current employer and would be interested in seeing the source code (if you are willing to share). I’m trying to get dba buy-in on the process and it would be helpful to articulate everything that is going to be done to the db.
Posted 11 Jul 2008 at 6:01 am ¶We’re trying to use your DbUpdater, but when I have indexes and foreign keys scripted in our baseline.sql file, the exe hangs.
The baseline.sql file runs perfectly fine in SQL Management Studio. DbUpdater will work if I remove all the indexes and foreign keys from baseline.sql and move them to post.X.sql scripts.
We’ve also noticed that if you only have 1 db changes file, DbUpdater will not recognize that there are any changes. We have had to create 2 db changes files before the DbUpdater would notice the updates.
Posted 15 Sep 2008 at 11:46 am ¶DbUpdater version 1.4 fixes two bugs -
1. If you only have 1 db changes file, DbUpdater will not recognize that there are any changes.
2. When you have indexes and foreign keys scripted in our baseline.sql file, the exe hangs.
Adrian and Cory, Thanks for your feedback.
Posted 20 Sep 2008 at 11:58 pm ¶Post a Comment