20 January 2004

A new pet project for 2004

I have a new goal/pet project for the early part of 2004, create an easy way of creating upgrade scripts from one database to another.  I'm thinking some sort of web based app that looks at the two schemas and lets you choose/map columns as needed.  I guess it could in theory be done “automagically“ but as I was working on an oracle version of some of the whidbey providers last night I realized that's very tough if you're making radical changes to the schema.  For example the original version of my oracle schema has RAW(16) columns that contain GUIDs as the primary keys.  This is similar to the implementation of the SQL Server ASP.NET Whidbey providers.  But for Oracle, the fact there's no set GUID or Uniqueidentifier column didn't sit well with me.  I didn't want to have to use VARCHAR(32) (or whatever it comes to).  So I decided to move everything to integer or NUMBER(12).  How to write a script that would modify the schema and preserve the data seemed pretty daunting.  It just seems like there should be an easier way to do this, other than writing a one off script every time.  So that's the task, possible? Maybe not, but definitely a challenge!

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