David Boucha wrote:
Allowing any developer access to modify the database without express
permission or doing an impact analysis is asking for trouble.
Great point.
In reading about CodeIgniter's database migration tool - it allows the
developer
to do the following (granted i only reviewed a small portion and have not
used
the tool so this might not be everything):
'* Each individual in a team is supposedly working on their own
installation of
your system.
* Whenever a team member makes a change to their database schema, he
extracts
that change into a class called a "migration".
* When he is done working, he can move those "changes" to any other
environment
(the "live" environment, for example) and "install" each migration'
- CodeIgnitor
One thing that is unsettling to me is the fact that any developer can make
changes and add that to the code base. Here in lies the issue - (IMHO) not
every
developer should be making the changes to the database that could be added
to a
production db. I don't want jr developers making changes to my db. I
think
your statements are true that there needs to be tons of communication and i
think there needs to be something to prohibit developers from making
changes
without some method to manage those changes. For this reason I am a big
fan of
code and database reviews and analysis before that code is introduced into
a
production baseline.
--
thebigdog
thebigdog, yes, I was referring to "migrating" changes from a development
database to production. As in keeping track of additions and changes to the
database during development of a project.
The reason I was interested in such a system comes from a project I was
involved with part-time this last summer. There were 4 full time developers
working on this project, and I only worked on it 2 or 3 days of the week. I
only had access to my local copy of the code and database. I found it very
difficult to keep my database in sync with the main development database.
The did keep a file with all the database scripts in it, but it was hard to
know which ones I had already applied to my copy of the database and they
didn't have any of the data that the application needed; such as menu items
and other things.
I think that for smaller groups a tool to help manage the database could be
very helpful. I just haven't tried it yet, so I was wondering if anyone else
had any experience with something similar.
Having migrations is nice, whether for just one or for more team members
- for example the Rails migrations are really spoiling - once you get
used to using it, it's hard to go back to a more manual way. I have
seen 2 big benefits - 1) it provides a nice logging audit trail - yes,
you can also do this by using VCS with good commit messages but the
migrations are handy. The 2nd big benefit is the ease and less error
prone way of making changes to the data - for example SQLite doesn't
offer much in the way of alter table yet at least in the Rails migration
tool it handles the dirty work of deleting columns, etc. If you do mess
up, at least with migrations you see what you did and can hopefully
correct it. To me now, migrations is one of the key items in evaluating
development approaches. I haven't tried out the CodeIgniter migration
tool but if it is similar, I would recommend trying it out.
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