Software Pouch

I found an interesting project: migrate4j which was introduced at Javalobby today. The idea behind this tool is to leverage the issues that come up when applications are developed using a relational database and the database schema changes between version. I.e., databases at customers or used by other developers have to be modified to the needs of the new version of the software. Probably you even want to downscale again.

The main page of the project already gives a good insight into the functionality of this tool. The idea is to describe "up" and "down" grading steps in Java classes that can be executed within the build automation cycle. Up and down are relative to the current version of the database. So it should be possible to up- and downgrade the database to the desired level automatically when needed.