Re: Version Control Software for Database Objects

Tim Allen <tim(at)proximity(dot)com(dot)au> writes:

> Mark Dexter wrote:
> > We maintain multiple versions of our application's database and we are
> > looking for version control software to help us automate this. Specifically,
> > we would like to have a program that automatically tracks all changes to the
> > database (tables, views, functions, etc.) and assists with updating
> > customers' databases from one version to the next.
> > Does anyone know of such a program that works with PostgreSQL? Thanks for
> > your help.

I do a pretty crude version of this manually. I do pg_dump -s which dumps out
the SQL for the schema and check that into CVS. I do this after any set of
database changes and add comments about what I've modified. (With 7.4 and
prior you have to filter out some lines that always change. But in 8.0 the
output looks to be cleaned up a lot.)

This gives me a record of the changes. But it doesn't really help migrate the
changes to another server. Well I guess it helps in that it gives me something
to go on. But it certainly doesn't do it for me.

I'm pretty skeptical about tools that do this stuff automatically. But I know
such tools exist. I don't know if any support Postgres though. You might check
out Toad and ERwin. Postgres is advancing so quickly I suspect none of the
commercial packages will be up to date though.

--
greg