Versioning data structures

When you maintain versions of an application, you often have to migrate changes from development to test, or from test to production. When you roll back data structure changes, you might also have to roll back data to a previous version of the application.

To properly maintain versions of an application, you must take baselines of your application that represent the state of the data structures (and possibly data) at specific points in time. Baselines are usually taken before an application’s data structures are put into production, and then periodically over time. Baselines provide a way to discern how a set of data structures has changed over time. You then use these baselines as input to the comparison process.

You can use the following types of comparisons to migrate or roll back changes to an application’s data structures:

• Baseline to baseline (migrating and rolling back changes)
• Baseline to catalog (migrating changes)
• Catalog to baseline (rolling back changes)

This section contains the following topics: