Forked dbdeploy.net

Dbdeploy.net is a database change management library, used by us at weListen to track the changes made to a database in the scope of a project and apply them as needed. It takes a folder full of ordered files containing the change scripts in sql and applies them as needed to a given database. It tracks which changes have been applied in a special table.

We’ve used for quite some time, and were mostly happy with it, except when using it from the command line on the servers. The msbuild task worked well to obtain and apply the changes, but the command line application added extra information to the output that needed to be trimmed before applying it to the server.

Well, it annoyed me enough to fork it from its home at sourceforge to a new place at github.

I refactored to projects a bit, to exclude a direct dependency on NAnt, and added a Dbdeploy.Powershell assembly with 3 commands:

• Export-DbUpdate, which outputs the scripts that need to be applied. Can write the scripts directly to a file;
• Push-DbUpdate, which applies the changes to the database (still has a bug when using with SQL Server, as I need to split the resulting script into batches);
• Select-DbUpdate outputs information about which sets need to be applied;

All of these commands take a path to a config file describing the database type, connection string and table name to store the changelog, and the directory where the actual changesets exist.

Also, instead of mucking about with NAnt as the build script host, I’m using psake. I really can’t stand using xml to describe build steps anymore.

To use it just download the release, and in powershell “import-module Dbdeploy.Powershell.dll”.