Re: Updating database structure

On Mar 23, 2006, at 9:50 AM, subscribe@angelosystems.com wrote:

> I currently use phpPgAdmin to make changes to the database, so it
> would
> be very handy if Postgres could add a change made to a lable
> somewhere,
> after which I gather all the rows with changes and put them in a SQL
> query.

My suggestion: don't do that.

What I do is keep the files used to create a database from scratch
under version control (such as subversion). Then, depending on how
active you development is, you can either commit scripts to make
schema changes every time they happen, or you can do a diff between
two releases of your application (you'll want to tag each release)
and see what's changed.

By changing things on-the-fly, you end up with no history of what's
changed, when it changed, and why it was changed (commit logs). You
may not thing having such information is important if you're the only
one working on something, but trust me, having that info available
has saved my bacon many times.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461