Re: How to manage the versions of databases ?

[Quoted] If you are modifying the structure of your databases every three months and releasing to your customers, you need to step back and do some longer-range analysis. Mapping out the complete goals and needs of your application will [Quoted] eliminate this management nightmare. An application's data structure should change at most once every major version release (ideally, at most once per [Quoted] year--some never change). When you do have to modify the structure, write one single conversion routine and take that with you to all the sites, after you have tested it well on a complete data set. That should ease the transitions and eliminate the manual work. The best way to deal with managing database structures is to design as fully as possible up front and change only when necessary thereafter.

"Nicolas Ecarnot" <nicolas.ecarnot_at_bigfoot.com> wrote in message news:9043B7E4Bnicolasecarnot_at_195.25.12.38...
> Hello,
>
> In my company, we sell a huge software that uses huges databases, and we
> modify the scheme of the databases almost every 3 months.
> This is very complex to manage for our customers, and we have to manually
> make big changes in their databases.
>
> We are looking for a way to manage rightly these updates, and we already
> have some ideas, but we can't imagine being the first company to deal with
> that hard problem.
>
> So may you give us some URL pointers to web pages explaining how it's
> usually done, or explain us the theory of updating a database model.
> I suppose that some tools exists, so perhaps you know one of these tools.
>
> Thank you in advance.
>
> --
> Nicolas Ecarnot | E-mail: nicolas.ecarnot_at_bigfoot.com
Received on Fri Feb 09 2001 - 21:03:00 CET