Static Data Management

Management of static data has been an issue in nearly every project that I have worked on.

By static data I mean data that influences program behaviour. For example, a program that checks the validity of input against a ControlTable and reacts accordingly.

As the system gets migrated through the various release levels (Development, Staging, UAT, Production) the data in these tables needs to be migrated as well.

The most common way to manage the data changes related to a release has been, in my experience, to store a bunch of SQL scripts in the VersionControl system. I have found that this technique nearly always leads to problems as the number of developers and complexity of the project increases.

How do other projects manage such things?

It seems database tools for version control are less mature than those for files. It is a fairly common issue, so I am surprised there are no commercial tools for it.

We use an AutomatedConfigurationManagementEnvironment that invokes batch files for such things