Our clients use SQLServer/Oracle databases. Over the years, we’ve sent them many update scripts which they had to run manually. Most of the time, everything went smooth, but every now and then a script did not run completely to the end or had some errors in it (which weren’t detected at the time of the upgrade). Also, sometimes even ‘smart users’ added indexes/tables into those databases themselves, for whatever reason. Later on, those irregularities lead to problems.
Now I have been tasked to figure out a way to verify/validate our clients databases against our own database schema (tables, datatypes, indexes, views, …). The output should be some kind of difference file indicating what is missing/what should not be in the database. I could do this in code (C++) from inside our application or I can create an external tool for just this one purpose.
Now before I start coding, I wanted to ask if there is already a tool out there that would produce the necessary results, or that at least could help me produce a decent xml file from our master-databases (Oracle and SQLServer)? Or is there a library which could help me write my own tool?
I’ve used this technique before and it doesn’t require buying any tools.
Enterprise Manager has a ‘Create Script’ feature. Perform this on your reference database and the comparison database. Select the appropriate options to generate scripts for the objects you care about. Next, just compare the two generated files with your favorite diff tool.
You can do a similar procedure with Oracle tools that let you export the DDL scripts.