dbdeploy - A Database Change Management Tool

Nick will be speaking at COLLABORATE 07. The session will be on 16th April at 9:15 AM.

The session will cover practical approaches to database refactoring and examine how the database fits into the world of continuous integration. You won’t be surprised to hear that we’ll be demonstrating dbdeploy as one of the tools that can help.

Hope to see you there.

We’ve added a very simple sample project that demonstrates ant integrated with dbdeploy. It runs against an in-memory hsql database. You can get it from the downloads page.

We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve made the shortlist in the Jolt Awards “Database Engines and Data Tools” category!

Winners will be announced at SD West on 17th March 2007, we’ll keep you posted…

We are pleased to announce the release of dbdeploy version 2.11.

This release was prompted by Jeff Mikres who kindly took it upon himself to write support for MySQL. Thanks Mike!

We’ve also fixed a null pointer exception bug that you would encounter if you didn’t supply a value for the undoOutputfile parameter.

You can download v2.11 here.

Jay Fields writes on his experiences of using Ruby on Rails Migrations with a large team:

It can also be troublesome to find specific changes to the database within multiple migration files. Finding which migration adds a specific column can take a fair amount of time when you are working with over 50 migration files. Naming conventions can mitigate this issue some; however, naming conventions generally require that only one action occur per file. For example, the 023_create_customers_table.rb file can only create the customer table and cannot alter the purchases table to add the customer_id column. This type of naming convention helps on searching for specific changes to the database; however, it also results in a large number of migration files.

RoR’s migrations is effectively an API for creating and applying database migrations. dbdeploy’s fundamental approach is that developers should know SQL - and it does of course have the added benifit of managing the delta scripts more effectively.

There is a nice piece about dbdeploy in January’s issue (75) of Linux User Magazine:

The dbdeploy application is a simple solution to the problem of managing and deploying database refactorings to development, quality assurance, user acceptance testing and production environments.