A Metadata Driven Approach to Performing Multi-vendor Database Schema Upgrades

This paper discusses problems associated with relational database schema migrations which commonly occur with major upgrade releases of enterprise software. The most prevalent method of performing a schema migration is to execute SQL script files before or after the software upgrade. This approach performs poorly with large or complex database migrations and also requires separate script files for each supported database vendor. A tool was developed for a complex database upgrade of an enterprise product which uses XML in a metadata driven approach. The key advantages include the ability to abstract complexity, provide multi-database vendor support and make the database migration more manageable between software releases.