Best practice to propagate DB scheme update into production

v.lukoyanov Nov 3, 2010 6:03 AM

Hi everyone.

My question is a bit off topic and not directly related to Seam, but I just wanna ask you, fellow Seam developers, about your practices to apply DB scheme changes from development environment into production.

I've got a website up and running (developed using Seam btw) in production for quite a while and now I want to introduce some new features that would involve scheme changes. And of course I want to migrate all existing data. Also I want to be able to do it in a smooth and most automated way, and I want to maintain all changes I've done somewhere in my SCM and be able to rollback them if I needed.

So is there any good tools to do that, and what's your experience and practices for that kind of task?

I've heard of a tool named liquibase, and I'm trying to evaluate it now. So if anyone uses that tool, please advice whether or not its worth using it.

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1. Re: Best practice to propagate DB scheme update into production

kapitanpetko Nov 3, 2010 9:51 PM (in response to v.lukoyanov)
That's a complex topic and there is no easy answer. In short:

write a lot of tests

if possible, don't migrate the data, just change the schema (add/drop column, etc.)

do a lot of testing :)

There is a book, of course, and it is pretty good: Refactoring Databases

HTH
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