mysql - How to synchronize development and production database

Question

Do you know any applications to synchronize two databases - during development sometimes it's required to add one or two table rows or new table or column. Usually I write every sql statement in some file and during uploading path I evecute those lines on my production database (earlier backing it up). I work with mySQL and postreSQL databases.

What is your practise and what applications helps you in that.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/255905/how-to-synchronize-development-and-production-database

Answer 1

You asked for a tool or application answer, but what you really need is a a process answer. The underlying theme here is that you should be versioning your database DDL (and DML, when needed) and providing change scripts to be able to update any version of your database to a higher version.

This set of links provided by Jeff Atwood and written by K. Scott Allen explain in detail what this ought to look like - and they do it better than I can possibly write up here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/02/get-your-database-under-version-control.html