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Re: How to CM an Oracle DB

From: Ron Perrella <perrella_at_mindspring.com>
Date: 1997/10/26
Message-ID: <3453F11B.62F69D83@mindspring.com>#1/1

> >1) The politial issue is that the DBA and Oracle developers feel all
 CM
> >should be concerned with is keeping track of the DB patches (which
 they
> >maintain themselves in their environment). This scope of CM is not
> >anywhere close to being acceptable. If CM is to manage (and be
> >responsible for) the configuration of the system (in system test and
 in
> >production), the database needs to be CM'd just like everything else,
 

> >especially since its the heart of the system.

Absolutely. Even a gorilla should be able to reproduce your system. If not, you are in deep doo-doo.

> >
> >2) The functional issue is that I do not know how to CM a DB. I
 cannot
> >find any resourses that describe how a database should be CM'd. The
> >books I have go into painful detail about SCM, but don't mention
> >anything about databases.
> >
>
> I have been looking for a tool to support this for a while with no
> luck.
> There are two approaches.
>
> Use a tool like ERWin to reverse engineer the database schema and
> version control the schema. This is not very granular, but given that
> you are working with a third party application this may be sufficient.
>
> If you are using Designer/2000 you could version control the
> application
> in Designer/2000.
>
> Extract all the database objects as individual files of ddl (create
> table.., create procedure... etc) and version control these. This
> gives
> a much finer level of control and makes it easier to control multiple
> development teams.
>
> The main drawbacks of this approach are
>
> 1) that in order to change a table you need (at least) an alter table
> command whereas what a traditional vc system gives you is two
> different
> create table commands.

DBA's love to change tables, rename fields, etc. In my opinion, they need the extra level of control that source control imposes. If you've got an emergency, fine - fix it. But otherwise, work via the DDL files.

The only people who change more things are System Admins! (Boy, gotta have my flack jacket now!)

> 2) vc systems don't know anything about databases and give no help in
> maintaining dependency information.

What do you mean by dependency information? If you control your DDL as part of your regular source control and you baseline your system for builds, then you have your dependencies taken care of. Or am I missing something?

>
>
> I am afraid there is no easy answer.
> --
> Jim Smith

If it was easy, everyone would do it.... Well, maybe not...

-Ron
CM - The Center of the Universe Received on Sun Oct 26 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT

Original text of this message

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