Using Git to track mysql schema - some questions

Question

If this is recommended ?

Can I ask some git command examples about how to track versions of mysql schema?

Should we use another repository other then the on

Answer 1

As brilliant as it sounds (the idea did occur to me as well), when I tried to implement it, I hit a wall. In theory, by using the --skip-extended-insert flag, despite initial dump would be big, the diffs between daily dumps should be minimal, hence the size increase over time of the repository could be assumed to be minimal as well, right? Wrong!

Git stores shapshots, not diffs, which means on each commit, it will take the entire dump file, not just the diff. Moreover, since the dump with --skip-extended-instert will use all field names on every single insert line, it will be huge compared to a dump done without --skip-extended-instert. This results in an explosion in size, the exact opposite what one would expect.

In my case, with a ~300MB sql dump, the repository went to gigabytes in days. So, what did I do? I first tried the same thing, only remove --skip-extended-instert, so that dumps will be smaller, and snapshots would be proportionally smaller as well. This approach held for a while, but in time it became unusable as well.

Still, the diff usage with --skip-extended-insert actually still seemed like a good idea, only, now I try to use subversion instead of git. I know, compared to git, svn is ancient history, yet it seems to work better, since it actually does use diffs instead of snapshots.

So in short, I believe best solution is doing the above, but with subversion instead of git.