OT: Configuration management for stateful data

Greetings all,

  I'm looking for advice on the best practises for configuration
  management of stateful data.

  This situation comes up in a few different places, but the
  best example (and the one I have right now) are database
  schema changes between software releases.

  For stateless portions of the system (i.e. the application
  code), it's easy to overwrite, or drop/replace (in the case
  of database stored procedures). However, stateful portions
  (i.e. database tables with data in them, configuration files,
   any other stateful information that may undergo a schema change),
  the usual configuration management procedures don't apply.
  You can't drop 12 months of data from your database because
  you need to rename a relational table....

  A bit of searching around on google didn't reveal anything,
  but it's hard to know if I'm searching for the wrong thing or
  if nothing really exists.

  I've thought a bit about the process that Subversion takes
  (a dump into a known format followed by a reload), but in
  our situation, building a tool like that is impractical.

  Has anyone done any deep thinking about this topic and come
  up with any good patterns to follow?

daniel

-- 
Signature at:  http://www.mel.au.adaptiveinternational.com/~danpat/signature.txt
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: dev-help@subversion.tigris.org