Moving to Subversion for PL-SQL development

First of all let me tell you that I don't know much of how PL-SQL development works so I might say something really obvious to you or more likely just wrong. Please forgive me.

I have a team that uses StarTeam as their VCS and we are now working on moving the project to Subversion. We are planning to use an importer for the initial load of the repository which seems to do what they want (I'm not looking after that part).

I have a problem though with their releasing process.

As I understand it, a major release is formed by all the packages and scripts, plus some table initialisation and sometime some data (I presume for defaults and stuff like that). Minor releases are done with patches which included only the packages that have changed from the previous patch.

So, if I want 5.4.0 (major release), I get everything. I unpack the kit, install it, run it, whatever it take and I'm done. If I am already on 5.4.0 and I want 5.4.3 (a minor release) I will be sent 3 patches: to 5.4.1, then 5.4.2 and finally 5.4.3. Apparently I just need to unzip them and I'm done.

Now, I might not be clear in the above process, so if someone with more experience with PL-SQL development and release wants to correct me, please do. I know there isn't one way to do things, but it's more likely that I understood wrong than we are doing it in a special way.

Anyway, if I am right, I'm struggling to come up with a process using Subversion. It seems they do not want to tag everything in trunk because that would be like a major release (apparently it would include those table and data things). Maybe we could re-organised the code to separate the packages from the data and then we could tag the packages, which is more what they want. And this way, to go to 5.4.3 I won't need 5.4.1 and 5.4.2 at all, which in my opinion is even better.

In the end what I am looking for with this email is some advice on how to proceed from people with more experience than me in projects using PL-SQL.

Thanks
Giulio Troccoli

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Received on 2010-10-29 15:11:42 CEST