Andrew Channels Dexter Pinion

Wherein I write some stuff that you may like to read. Or not, its up to you really.

February 16, 2004

Gerald the half a schema 0.1

Gerald is a schema comparison tool for relational databases. Currently it supports MySQL and Oracle.

Release 0.1 allows schemas to be read from the database data dictionary, stored in an internal model and then compared with another schema. In addition the internal model can be written to XML.

The same operations are also possible on schema components such as tables, views and sequences.

This is an alpha release and whilst it has been tested there may still be bugs.

Gerald is released under the BSD License. The project home page is here and the code can be downloaded from here.

Posted by Andy Todd at February 16, 2004 12:35 PM

Comments

Cool!

(When are you planning to add support for a *real* database[1]? ;-) Though at the moment, support for a noddy one[2] would be more useful to me...)

Oh, and why "Gerald"? I would have thought that this was the ideal opportunity for a software package named "Lick my Love Pump".

[1] http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/iseries/db2/
[2] http://www.microsoft.com/sql/

Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 16, 2004 01:21 PM

Simon,

1. IBM can KMA. As previously discussed over beer, generating change DDL (which is currently scheduled for release 0.3) for DB2 is impossible. The data dictionary is a bit of a mare as well. I won't be doing this in a hurry. But if someone wants to write a module I'll support it.

2. As of next month I will no longer have access to a Windows machine - apart from a minute partition I keep around for old time's sake - so this is unlikely to happy until/if I return to full time employment. But if someone wants to write a module I'll support it.

Posted by: Andy Todd on February 16, 2004 01:37 PM

Andy,
DB2 is one thing, and UDB2/400 is quite another - it handles change DDL happily enough. I'd *certainly* not expect you to support it, though!

If I ever really have the need to use, uh, Gerald over SQL Server or UDB2/400, I'll put a module together and submit it.

Posted by: Simon Brunning on February 16, 2004 01:52 PM