Question

Implementing a GIT repository for a project we are including the DB structure by generating a dump on the post-commit hook on deployment.

What I would like to have is a simple versioning system for the file based on the timestamp of the last change to the tables structure.

After finding this post with the suggestion to check for the dates of the the *.frm files in the MySQL data dir I thought the solution would be to implement it based on that last date as part of the generated file. This is:

1. Find out the latest date-time of the files of the DB (i.e. /var/lib/mysql/databaseX/) via an ls command (of type ls -la *.frm)

2. compare that value (last changed file) with the one of a certain file (ie /project/dump_2012102620001.sql) where the numbers correspond to the last generated dump.

3. If files timestamp is after that date generate the mysqldump command, otherwise ignore so the dump does not get generated and
   committed as a change to GIT

Unfortunately my Linux console/bash concepts are too far from being capable and have not found any similar script to use.

Answer 1

You can save yourself a lot of grief by just dumping the table structure every time with the appropriate mysqldump command as this is relatively lightweight since it won’t include table contents. Strip out the variable timestamp information at the top and compare with the previous file. Store if different.