The software system I work on is a medical billing system, large amounts of data and data tables, and stored procedures.
I was reading the article "12 Steps to Better Code" and in The Joel Test #2 states: Can you make a build in one step?
Now I was wondering, does this mean deployment build (so that a customer can update their deployment).
Now the main issue I'm running across, is how do you do a one step database update?
At the current time, when we make changes to a database, all changes are recorded and added to a database update script, which gets a version number attached to it when a deploy to customer build is created.
Is there a simpler way to do this? Some script or application out there that takes a "before and after" look at a database schema and creates an update script like I mentioned?
Or is this just the way everyone does it, which I would find hard to believe, but plausible.
An automated system would decrease errors, and speed up deployment build times considerably, and I would be interested in knowing how to do so.
There's various levels of complexity that you can go through:
if you have update scripts that you create manually, and are just looking for a way to easily apply those to various servers, check out the SSW SQL Deploy by SSW Consulting. It can handle that scenario very nicely
if you tend to do more of a database diff approach, then Red Gate's SQL Compare (already mentioned) and SQL Packager make a great combo. You can diff the database between old and new and then apply the changes in a nice package - as an EXE or a C# project
if you want a real, end-to-end, well thought out approach (with a bit of a learning curve), check out Innovartis' DBGhost approach. It's a entire methodology / technique how to handle database development and incremental updates. It's very powerful and look very promising - but it's a bit of an all-or-nothing approach: either you buy into it and use it end-to-end, or you don't
Hope this helps a bit!