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News: Sundog Database Refactoring Tool Early Access Program Opens

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  1. Sundog Database Refactoring Tool Early Access Program Opens (7 messages)

    Sundog has announced the opening of the early access program for its Database Refactoring Tool (SDRT), a DBMS-independent tool to ease database development in an agile environment. The core of the SDRT is the migrator, which eases the tracking and application of database changes. The migrator is built on 3 main features:
    • All changes are stored in your source control system along with the rest of your code in a format that works well with branching and merging
    • Each change has a easy to generate, yet unique across time and space identifier
    • Each database knows what changes have been applied to it and which have not so it can be easily updated to match what the current version of the code expects
    Sundog says the SDRT's database-system independence, and that it "understands" what changes need to be made to any version of your database schema, sets it apart from other tools. The SDRT can be run as a command line tool, an Ant task, or as a servlet context listener which allows your schema to be updated automatically whenever your site is re-deployed. The initial release is focused around the migrator, but future features planned for the final release include:
    • Additional refactorings
    • Refactoring GUI IDE Plug-in
    • Stored procedures/Views support
    • Extracting sample data from a larger dataset
    • Generating testing data for tables
    • DB unit testing harness
    • .Net support
    • SQL editor
    • Support for additional DBMSs
    • Database diagram generation
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    Threaded Messages (7)

  2. I need this[ Go to top ]

    Database upgrades and migrations have always solved by manual procedures and scripts. Apache has a project called ddlutils, it does simular things but it's not moving very fast and doesn't focus on agile development. I hope the migrations framework from the ruby world will inspire the java people to come up with something that works and makes databases easier to manage.
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  3. Re: I need this[ Go to top ]

    The migrator portion of the software should be ready to use for production use. We have been using it internally for several years and it has worked well for us. We agree there is a need for it and that is why we are opening it up as a public product. I have looked at many different options and they all seem to fall short in one way or another. Like you said, ddlutils isn't doing much, and while the Ruby Migrations framework is similar, the fact that it doesn't work with branches like our product does is a dealbreaker for that framework. If you are at all interested, download it, give it a try, and give us feedback. We are very interested in what needs the community has to know what priority to give new features and what the market would be for such a product.
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  4. Licence[ Go to top ]

    Looks good, but there's no mention on whether this is or will be a commercial or OS product. What licence do you plan to use? Good luck Kit
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  5. Re: Licence[ Go to top ]

    Looks good, but there's no mention on whether this is or will be a commercial or OS product. What licence do you plan to use?
    To be honest, we haven't fully decided. We've looked at both options, and may use a combination of both. It will probably depend on the directions the product takes.
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  6. Congratulations[ Go to top ]

    This is the most sensible solution I have seen for automating database synchronization. Maintaining the state of tables between the test and live databases of an application are one of the most frustratingly error prone steps in the deployment process. I hope to see something like your product become a standard solution for this problem domain. Cheers, Wade
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  7. Re: Sundog Database Refactoring Tool Early Access Program Opens[ Go to top ]

    Very interesting. It might be hard to get existing db devs to migrate to a whole new db ide. Have you thought about supporting this as a plugin to Oracle SqlDeveloper and jDeveloper?
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  8. Re: Sundog Database Refactoring Tool Early Access Program Opens[ Go to top ]

    Very interesting.

    It might be hard to get existing db devs to migrate to a whole new db ide.

    Have you thought about supporting this as a plugin to Oracle SqlDeveloper and jDeveloper?
    We are actually planning on creating the refactoring GUI tool as a plug in to various IDEs. My original proof of concept that the screenshots on the site are from was a stand alone app, but I quickly found that needing one more tool open limited my using the refactoring GUI. We will probably still create a stand-alone GUI for people using non-supported IDEs, but will release plug-ins for the major IDEs (including jDeveloper and SqlDeveloper)
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