Database documentation

It is so frustrating to guess database structure intention without any information about it. Liquibase has a great feature, which helps to prevent a lot of guessing. Liquibase can generate an html documentation of db. However the documentation is pretty sparse. But be not frustrated, there is a light over there at the end of the tunnel...

LiquiBase - the way to handle a database

I am in a middle of rework of an old script. Whole structure of a solution was cumbersome a lot so I had to step in to correct the stuff. I knew that the script has some data in a MySQL database. It uses few tables in a large db with tens and tens of other tables.

Automatic deployment part 1

I want to have a deployment process not to be manual anymore. After research I settled for Hudson as an deployment server and I am heading towards continuous integration. I am not sure at the moment if Subversion is righ CRM for the task and thinking of switching to Git. Deploy scripts are to be written in Ant.

The process as I think of is following. Programmers will work on their working copies of projects. Once they are satisfied with progress they commit to the trunk of CRM for the project. Hudson picks up the commit and starts deployment using Ant build script of the project to the testing server. Once we reach set of features and stability required, we mark build as staging ready and Hudson will pick it up and replay it to the staging server to see if the build on production will be functional. If so we mark the build as production build and let Hudson to replay it to the production environment.

There is many things which bothers me. Our projects are usually dependent on other projects of ours. One change in a DB backend required for one project affects few other projects. Deployment needs to account for that. Also tagging in Subversion seems to be a headache to put in symbiosis with Hudson.