At work we have 4 people working together on a few different projects. For each project we each have a local copy we work on and then there is a development, staging, and live deployment, along with any branches we have (we use subversion). Our database is MySQL.
So my question is, what is a good way to manage which revisions to the database have been made to each deployment (and for the developers their local copies). Right now each change goes into a text file that is timestamped in the name and put into a folder under the project. This isn’t working very well to be honest.. I need a solution that will help keep track of what has been applied where.
If your database maps nicely to a set of data access objects, consider using ‘migrations’. The idea is to store your data model as application code with steps for moving forward and backward through each database version.
I believe Rails did it first.
Java has at least one project.
And here’s a .NET migration library.
To change versions, you run a simple script that steps through all of the up or down versions to get you to the version you want. The beauty of it is, you check your migrations into the same source repository as your app code – it’s all in one place.
Maybe others can suggest other migration libraries.
Cheers.
Edit: See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/313/net-migrations-engine and .NET database migration tool roundup (from above post).