Techniques to keep database schema up to date?

I think its very hard to find a ready made, magical tool that maintain your schema changes, I think its not hard to implement your custom tool and design the updates incrementally and make your own versioning system of the database.

I think its very hard to find a ready made, magical tool that maintain your schema changes, I think its not hard to implement your custom tool and design the updates incrementally and make your own versioning system of the database. My suggestion (and I do that) is to make a small updater tool that take the update scripts from the new version of the application and apply the required updates depending on the previous DB version that is saved somewhere, the update scripts should be robust and well-written and don't make a damage for the old data. Because DDL changes are not inversable (You can't use transactions) I suggest to take a backup for the database before the update process and restore it if the update failed or delete it.

I'd rather use an existing tools to manage that (such as rails migrations) instead of reinventing the wheel myself. Thus I want recommendation of tools that does similar things. To see many different approaches of managing DDL changes.

– Chi-Lan Aug 16 at 8:29.

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