Managing structural DB changes

Markus Ruggiero <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.web.webobjects.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
This may be OT in direct relation to WO but certainly not in relation  
to deployment of large scale db apps.

I am sure some (all?) of you have or will have at one point in time  
the following problem:

You deploy your version 1.0 application at a customer site with a  
certain database structure. Now you continue developing your app and  
soon the greatest new version 2.0 will be available. However the  
database structure has changed and you face the problem that you have  
to upgrade the database at the customers site. A simple export / drop  
tables / create tables / import is not doable because you may have to  
split or join tables, move attributes to different tables, and make  
incompatible changes to data types.

How do you manage such a scenario? In my case the application manages  
third party devices (phones). Now every couple of months the vendors  
update those devices or throw completely new ones with new  
capabilities on the market. Our customers expect our application to  
support those new phones and the new or changed features. As we are  
managing different phones from different vendors in a unified way we  
have to update our datamodel all the time. As this is an app for the  
corporate high end market we have customers with different releases.  
Sometimes we have to upgrade a customer from V2 to V3, sometimes it is  
V2.1 to V2.2 or V2.8 to V3.4. This means that upgrades are incremental  
but the necessary increments may change from installation to  
installation

Any and all inputs very welcome
Thanks and have a nice day

---markus---

Markus Ruggiero
rucotec consulting and technologies    email     mailto:[email protected]
rucotec GmbH                           web       http://www.rucotec.ch
Steinentorstrasse 8
4051 Basel                             Mobile    +41 (0)79 508 4701
Switzerland                            Phone/Fax +41 (0)61 271 4990

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