Re: looking for a good way to change manage oracle

On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 22:00:57 +0000, ryan_gaffuri_at_comcast.net <ryan_gaffuri_at_comcast.net> wrote:
> We have 13 development databases, 8 parallel development tracks, and 2 concurrent sustainment releases all developing at the same time. We are having alot of trouble with change management. I am looking for an easy way to do the following:
> take a snapshot of the metadata of a database at a point in time.
> compare it at a later point in time or to another database and see the differences.

I've always approached it from the other direction. Developers don't have the ability to modify objects. If they want to create make a change to the structure of an object they have to write it as a script (for new objects) or ammend the existing script and give it to the DBA who will run it. Scripts are stored in SCCS which handles versioning.  Seeing the changes can be a simple as doing a diff of the scripts at two different versions.

There are plenty of scripts out there to extract the meta data to a file. It shouldn't be too difficult to adapt one to first identify allt he objects to extract then extract each object to a uniquely named file (e.g. cre_[object_type]_object_name.sql) to avoid the problem of objects being in different orders in the file.

There's a tool called DDL Wizard that you can download (I don't remeber the URL but Google should be able to find it for you) for free that will extractthe DDL and output as either a set of HTML pages or the SQL scripts to recreate the objects. If you create the HTML files you could do a diff on them. It's also handy for generating some quick and dirty documentation for your database structure.

Stephen

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