I recently posted about this question and was directed to a number of tool
products that might help, but I have a feeling that its more about technique
than tools.

I have a database that is being developed on a Linux development server.
Separate to this, I have a Linux test server where users are testing the PHP
application that works with the database. I'm attempting to do nightly
updates of the test application & database schema changes to coincide with
test reports coming back from my testers.

I can update the PHP application pages with no issue. However since my
users have created a lot of test data, I need to be able to update the
database schema without affecting the data in the tables. I'm not an expert
in SQL databases and how to do this, but I believe that I can do it with
ALTER commands, etc. The problem is that I have 20+ tables in this
database, and about 100 stored procedures, so all aspects of the database
could change between updates.

What is the best way to update the 'delta' between databases, but protect
the data stored in the tables from being deleted out?

Myles


============================
Myles Wakeham
Director of Engineering
Tech Solutions US, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona USA
Phone (480) 451-7440
www.techsol.org