Database Version Control for MySQL

Question

What method do you use to version-control your database? I\'ve committed all our database tables as separate .sql scripts to our respository (mercurial). In that way, if any

Answer 1

I'm not sure how well this answers your question, but I tend to just use mysqldump (part of the standard installation). This gives me the sql to create the tables and populate them, effectively serializing the database. Example:

> mysqldump -u username -p yourdatabase > database_dump.sql

To load a database from a dump sql file:

mysql -u username -p -e "source /path/to/database_dump.sql"

To further answer your question, I would version control each table separately only if there are multiple people working on the database in such a way that conflicts are likely to occur with just a single dump being version controlled. I've never hit a project where this is the case (the database tends to be one of the least volatile portions of the system after the initial phases of the project), so I just version control the database dump as a whole rather than each table individually.