Stored procedures/DB schema in source control

Question

Do you guys keep track of stored procedures and database schema in your source control system of choice?

When you make a change (add a table, update an stored proc,

Answer 1

Couple different perspectives from my experience. In the Oracle world, everything was managed by "create" DDL scripts. As ahockley mentioned, one script for each object. If the object needs to change, its DDL script is modified. There's one wrapper script that invokes all the object scripts so that you can deploy the current DB build to whatever environment you want. This is for the main core create.

Obviously in a live application, whenever you push a new build that requires, say, a new column, you're not going to drop the table and create it new. You're going to do an ALTER script and add the column. So each time this kind of change needs to happen, there are always two things to do: 1) write the alter DDL and 2) update the core create DDL to reflect the change. Both go into source control, but the single alter script is more of a momentary point in time change since it will only be used to apply a delta.

You could also use a tool like ERWin to update the model and forward generate the DDL, but most DBAs I know don't trust a modeling tool to gen the script exactly the way they want. You could also use ERWin to reverse engineer your core DDL script into a model periodically, but that's a lot of fuss to get it to look right (every blasted time you do it).

In the Microsoft world, we employed a similar tactic, but we used the Red Gate product to help manage the scripts and deltas. Still put the scripts in source control. Still one script per object (table, sproc, whatever). In the beginning, some of the DBAs really preferred using the SQL Server GUI to manage the objects rather than use scripts. But that made it very difficult to manage the enterprise consistently as it grew.

If the DDL is in source control, it's trivial to use any build tool (usually ant) to write a deployment script.