How should you build your database from source control?

Question

There has been some discussion on the SO community wiki about whether database objects should be version controlled. However, I haven\'t seen much discussion about t

Answer 1

Rather than get into white tower arguments, here's a solution that has worked very well for me on real world problems.

Building a database from scratch can be summarised as managing sql scripts.

DBdeploy is a tool that will check the current state of a database - e.g. what scripts have been previously run against it, what scripts are available to be run and therefore what scripts are needed to be run.

It will then collate all the needed scripts together and run them. It then records which scripts have been run.

It's not the prettiest tool or the most complex - but with careful management it can work very well. It's open source and easily extensible. Once the running of the scripts is handled nicely adding some extra components such as a shell script that checks out the latest scripts and runs dbdeploy against a particular instance is easily achieved.

See a good introduction here:

http://code.google.com/p/dbdeploy/wiki/GettingStarted