I’ve been surfing around the interweb trying to find educated opinions on a database version control question I’ve been batting around in my head. Here’s the situation: you’re the Release Manager. You’ve got a project in one of your Development environments that’s coming to a close for a new version. Most of the updates have been checked-in and you are getting ready to promote this version from Development to the QA environment for testing. Your database is under Oracle version control using dbMaestro TeamWork.

Now, the question: how can we make sure all our updates are in the version control, and how do we stabilize the SCM? A couple of programmers are still making updates and the DBA is already making changes to support the next version in development. This is a situation we’ve been asked about by our customers and prospects on more than one occasion. This reminds me of a saying a good friend of mine uses on occasion… “It’s like herding cats“.

We at dbMaestro have been contemplating a new product feature to help solve this. The feature (provisionally called “Freeze”) would allow you to “Freeze” a schema such that no check-outs will be allowed; check-ins will be allowed to make sure we can catch any straggling updates. One of my colleagues is actually also advocating a “Force check-in all” option which will immediately commit any open (checked-out) changes.

Once everything is checked-in, we can save a schema-version that has all the changes we want as a baseline version, at which point we can use dbMaestro Deployment Manager to deploy this version in it’s entirety to QA for testing. We can also “Unfreeze” the development environment to allow everyone to continue their work on the next release or bugfix.

We’d be real happy to get some feedback on this issue, as we’d like to integrate this feature into one of our next releases. Feel free to leave us a comment – we’d really appreciate it.