Re: Change Management: Quest Schema Mangler or Embarcadero Change Mangler

Hi David,

"Change Mangler"? Hmmm...I'm not sure if that's a typo or a Freudian slip :)

I've just come from a project at a telecommunications company where I used Change Manager ...I was happy with it for a number of reasons, not the least of which that it could "speak" both Oracle and Sybase, which was helpful. As you've said though it
only identifies structural changes so if we ran DML scripts in the DEV environment, it wouldn't identify that the row changes had not yet been propagated to the PROD environment. To do this, an internal tool was developed to compare each table in the two environments and show any differences in a temporary.
So although I can vouch for Embarcadero Change Manager for producing DDL scripts I don't have a product recommendation for verifying that DML was correctly propagated to a production environment.

Regards,

Steve

David Sisk wrote:

> We are deploying weekly builds into a production environment with around
> 1400 database objects. Currently, we "reverse-engineer" INSERT scripts of
> all the production data (which isn't that much at this point), drop all
> database objects, and re-create. When the data grows for another month or
> so, this won't be a practical way to apply changes.
>
> So, we need a tool to identify differences between (let's say) a DEV schema
> and a PROD schema, and generate the DLL and DML (to modify data for column
> changes) to apply those changes while preserving the data. Not an easy
> task!
>
> We initially looked at Oracle Change Management Pack, but it doesn't support
> global temporary tables in Oracle8.1.7, doesn't support the FLOAT datatype,
> etc., etc. What a disappointment that Oracle's own CM tool doesn't support
> their own database features. Go figure.
>
> So, moving to the third party world, what appears to be the two best
> contenders at this point are Quest's Schema Manager (although it doesn't
> support global temporary tables either) and Embarcadero's DBArtisan Change
> Manager. I'm also using TOAD, EZSQL, and a freebie called SchemaCompare to
> perform a comparison of DEV and PROD after changes are applied.
>
> Neither Schema Mangler nor DBArtisan Change Mangler appear to be perfect,
> although so far, DBArtisan Change Mangler appears to yield the best results.
> I've set up test schemas where I can apply the changes using the tools, and
> then compare the results. Of course, in the using the 3 compare tools I
> mentioned above, I get 3 different answers. I could just do all this with
> data dictionary queries, but with 1400 database objects, it becomes quite an
> over-whelming task.
>
> Enough background, here are the questions:
>
> 1) Has anyone used or compared Quest Schema Mangler and/or Embarcadero
> DBArtisan Change Mangler? Is there another tool that I haven't found yet
> that works even better? Do you have any horror stories to relate regarding
> either tool?
>
> 2) Here's the most important question: If you compared change management
> tools, how did you go about comparing the source and post-change target
> after the changes were applied? Obviously you can't use the same tool (if
> it missed some detail the first time, it'll obviously miss the same detail
> the second time.)
>
> Any info or opinions appreciated! Please post or email.
>
> Regards,
> Dave
Received on Tue May 01 2001 - 08:08:47 CDT