Evo DB - Bringing Evolutionary Database Design for Schema Editing Tools with a Version Control System

Gonçalo Pereira da Costa

Key information

Authors:

Gonçalo Pereira da Costa (Gonçalo Pereira da Costa)

Supervisors:

Paulo Jorge Fernandes Carreira (Paulo Jorge Fernandes Carreira)

Published in

06/24/2022

Abstract

The main focus of Schema Editing Tools (SETs) is to facilitate database development and management. They provide an easy-to-use GUI with which Database Administrators (DBAs) and developers can manipulate the database schema and data easily and quickly, without even needing to know what SQL is issued. However, the use of these tools blocks the use of more evolutionary practices (more iterative and incremental practices) in the database development process. These tools do not allow the developer to save the statements the SET issued "under the hood" in a consistent and organized way. That makes it very difficult for developers that use SETs to do database versioning and transmit the executed statements to other environments like other developers' sandboxes or Quality Assurance (QA) or production. This difficulty is also an obstacle to the integration of the database development process into Continuous Integration (CI). Evo DB has a connection, Evo JDBC, that is passed to a SET that allows Evo DB to capture all the SQL operations successfully done by the SET, making them available in the Evo Version Control System (VCS). Evo VCS lets the developer generate and manage migrations based on the SQL issued by the SET and perform coherent database deployments.