Datical DB

I saw a Mr. Pete Pickerill of Datical speak on Datical DB which is built on top of an open source piece of software called Liquibase and felt a lot like a different, comparable open source piece of software I've used called The Tarantino Project. Datical DB is not free however, it is enterprise software. As with Tarantino, a schema gets an extra table that keeps track of what scripts have been run against a given instance of a database so that a continuous integration process may update the database with just the lacking scripts as kept in source code. Tarantino uses raw SQL while Datical has an XML abstraction. Tarantino is for MSSQL while MSSQL, Oracle, mySQL, PostgreSQL, and IBM's DB2 all jive with Datical's stuff which also has a GUI and a "Forecast" feature that warns us when we are doing something like truncating a field will which sabotage existing data. The talk was an Agile Austin special interest group thing held at Bazaarvoice. A Mr. Carey Benge of Datical also spoke and emphasized the need to keep scripts small and atomic in database change management implementations.