This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Elliotte Rusty Harold. Original Post: Seeking an Agile Database Definition Language Feed Title: Mokka mit Schlag Feed URL: http://www.elharo.com/blog/feed/atom/? Feed Description: Ranting and Raving Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Elliotte Rusty Harold Latest Posts From Mokka mit Schlag

The database schemas for my current project are getting hashed out, mostly in Visio. This is pretty but not very automatable. I’d like to see if we can follow a more agile, iterative approach to database development. In particular, I’d like to be able to check the database definition into source code control and build the whole thing, including database tables and sample databases for testing out of Ant. Requirements include:

1. Supports (at a minimum) MySQL and Derby
2. Can be read by Java and Python
3. Allows for inserting of data for unit testing; i.e. not just table definitions

It also wouldn’t hurt if it could reverse engineer existing SQL databases.

I’m tempted to write my own, probably using XML, but surely someone has already done this? I haven’t found a lot though. What I’ve got so far are these, none of which really meet the requirements:

Andromeda

Andromeda uses YAML for the database definition language. The downside is that only a PHP parser is currently available. I’d have to write one for Java and/or Python.

Python

We have some database generation code written in Python. Maybe I should just use Jython to call this from Java? It still feels like a hack though.

Raw SQL

We could just write a big SQL script to set up the tables and load in the data. However JDBC can’t execute SQL scripts, only individual statements. (Perhaps this is fixed somewhere in some project?)

Surely this is an obvious enough idea that someone has already done it? Probably in XML? Any ideas?