Saturday, May 13, 2006
An Apache project called DdlUtils may be useful.
A few days ago I came across an an Apache project called
DdlUtils. It was only after I dug around a bit that I discovered that they haven't released any binaries yet! However, I was able to check it out from their subversion respository and build it using Ant. It currently describes itself as version 1.0-dev.
What it does is enables you to migrate schema and content between databases that have as associated JDBC driver (which is most of them these days!). It does this through an associated DDL (data definition) file, which is in XML format. So for example, you could develop an SQL schema on a PostgreSQL database, use DdlUtils to generate a DDL file from it and then use that to generate the schema in a MySQL database. You can then use in to evolve the schema in parallel, so you could change the schema in the PostgreSQL database, generate another DDL file and then ask DdlUtils nicely to evolve the schema in the MySQL database to match it. It should work for content too, so in theory you could use it take a dump of the database content of one vendor and import the dump into the database of another.
This could come in handy with TReCX, because we want to keep the schema generic and not tied to closely to any one specific database.
