Installing/Upgrading an Oracle schema

I am a release manager who is looking for a better way of installing an Oracle schema. Let me explain.

The company I work for makes a fairly complex, highly configurable client/server application that is built on top of an Oracle database. With each release of the product (be it a full installation or upgrade), the software depends on a certain data model and set of "seed" data to be present in the database for the product to run. Part of the installation is to configure the database. Currently we do not do this in the most intelligent way.

Installations are easier since there is no existing database. For installations we import a exported dump of the database as we need it configured.

Upgrades are a little trickier. Since the software is so configurable (and data could have been added since the install), the upgrade needs to preserve this data as well as populate the database with the new data. Currently, this is done by a series of scripts that are run to manipulate the data [model]. Maintaining the scripts is EXTREMELY cumbersome and I am looking for a new solution.

Is anyone aware of any good tools that can (and I am sure I am asking for a holy grail here :-) evaluate the changes between two data models and apply the changes easily and seemlessly? How do most software installations that require a database configuration work?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Gregg

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http://www.deja.com/ Received on Tue Feb 06 2001 - 20:22:42 CET