So you wanna version your database…
April 13th, 2011 by Benjamin Pollack
When we launched Kiln, I knew we were solving a bunch of major problems that users actively had. I knew that because every time that I talked to someone, and walked them through what Kiln was capable of, they got really excited and asked piles of questions of how they could integrate Kiln into their current workflow.
But there was one question that just kept coming up time and time again:
How do you version databases?
I really empathize with this problem, because it impacts every single web application I write. It’s easy to version your code, to version your documentation, to version your images, to version your deployment scripts. But versioning the database schema gets hard. For really big systems, you end up needing piles of migration tools, but for most stuff, that’s overkill. You just need a simple way of tracking and applying changes to your schema. Using version control to store your migration scripts ends up being this weird version controlling your version control.
The great folks at Red Gate actually already came up with a good solution to this problem, called SQL Source Control, which allows you to version your schema, and even optionally your data, right inside your existing source control system. The only problem is that, up to now, it only worked with traditional SCMs.
The key words being: up to now.
Red Gate and Fog Creek are both happy to announce that SQL Source Control 2.1 now includes full support for Mercurial, meaning you can now trivially version your database schema in Kiln. And because SQL Source Control ultimately just works with the SQL statements that generate your database, it’s easy to make sense of the diffs from within Kiln. You’ll finally be able to bring the power of DVCS and Kiln to your database.
If you’d like to try it out, there’s a 28-day free trial available that will let you play with SQL Source Control and see how it integrates into your workflow.
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