Question

ok, say you have two dbs. one you use as a master template which goes through various revisions, let’s say we’re now on revision 3. but the second db is a copy of the template as it was at revision 1.

because db 2 is in use, you don’t want to drop any tables, but you do need to update the structure of the entire db to the latest version of db 1.

is there any method of doing this without having to manually go through and make all the same changes again and again (over many dbs at various versions) and without losing any of the data?

i know data integrity is the problem, because some data may no longer be valid etc etc, but isn’t there a way to override that?

ideally i just want to be able to use the mysqldump of the structure of db 1 and overwrite any conflicting tables in db 2 with the new versions from db 1 without losing all the data. if there’s any way to do this in phpmyadmin, that would be grand.

Answer 1

You can try MySQL workbench; it allows you to

1. Create schema from a MySQL database.
2. import the schema into the MySQL workbench by reverse engineering the db version 3,
3. and then compare it with the schema in db version 1 to generate a SQL alter script.