Three-way analysis & merge are very different to traditional compare and sync tools, both from a technical point of view, and from a practical point of view.

Using a traditional comparison tool – we compare A to B, performing a two-way-compare (development to testing for instance).  Comparing A to B will result in very shallow results.  For example, “A is different than B”, or “object X is in A and not in B.”   There is no way of knowing if either A or B has changed, or if X was added in A or deleted from B.  As a result, you have to start looking for additional information, go ask the developers, the DBAs, etc.

This is incomplete information, and of course, after you investigate and understand the reason for change, and decide what is the safest thing to do – relying on compare and sync tools will only enable you to either deploy A or deploy B, nothing in-between!

Using dbMaestro TeamWork will get you a deep examination of changes, leveraged by a three-way-analysis:

All changes are analyzed and examined with relevance to previous versions or a reference environment (this is an A vs. B vs. C analysis, hence a three-way-compare).  When deploying changes from development to integration, TeamWork will also analyze the previous revisions of the relevant database objects, and return with very informative and final results.  If A is different than B, you will know if A changed or B changed, because you know what their previous state was.  The result is a perfect understanding of changes that enables TeamWork to recommend the appropriate action.

If an object has changed in development – TeamWork will suggest you deploy it to integration.  However, if another team has updated the integration environment, and it is different to development, TeamWork knows it will cause damage to overwrite integration, and will recommend you ignore the change, or take it back to development.  All of this comes with complete documentation of each change, and the reasons it was introduced.

But the good stuff doesn’t end there – TeamWork will also deal with conflicts: if a change was introduced to both A and B (typical when more than one team develops for the same database), an automatic conflict resolving engine will come into play.  Based on all the analyzed information, TeamWork will suggest combined code, taking all changes into consideration and merging changes from both development and integration into a single piece of code.

The TeamWork three-way-analysis and automatic conflict code resolver is a unique offering for the database world.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 2:28 AM and is filed under Technical. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.