Schema update using Xteq5 Database Tool

Any application that uses a database need a solution for a common problem: Schema updates. This means, the database needs to be changed in order to support the newest features of the software.

The experience I have so far with other applications doing schema updates is not very good. Usually it works if the SQL server is plain vanilla but as soon as anything has been changed, it all breaks down.

Either the schema update simply stops with a cryptic error message or it fails "silently" so when you start the application you get all sorts of errors. And it's always a lot of fun to fix such errors, just because something wasn't thinking enough.

In Xteq5, the schema updates are done with the "Xteq5 Database Tool". As we use a lot of very specific SQL Server features (Windows authentication, Snapshot Isolation, Change Tracking etc.) it includes a lot of checks to make sure the database is in a useable state. When something isn't right, it will be fixed automatically.

Any schema update that is performs is done in a transaction. So either this schema version is successfully updated, or nothing will be changed at all.

Finally, it will log all SQL statements so when there is an error you'll know exactly what has gone wrong.

Project Home active

Finally, the new project homepage on CodePlex is online.

Please visit http://xteq5.codeplex.com/

Restart – Again

It somehow seems this project likes to be restarted over and over again. We have again a complete different approach.

Here’s the history of Xteq5 so far:

Version 1: Designed for exactly one customer. It was implemented as native Windows application (Delphi client and server) with VBScript scripting support only.

Version 2: Rewritten version 1 in RemObjects Oxygene/Chrome. To sum it up how we performed: Bad design, bad performance and bad architecture. Buried.

Version 3: C# using Visual Studio 2005/2008 with a new architecture. Did run, worked good but all test customers told us that it was too complicated (Local Setup, SQL Server setup and maintenance, Backup, Rollout etc.) as we were aiming SMBs. Enterprise customers that would be fine with this, but they also required enterprise support which we can’t provide.

Version 4: Version 3 “In the cloud”. No local server needed, no database backup etc. Due to the insolvency of WUG this version was never finished.

Version 5: The current one. No longer a commercial product, but a spare-time project of myself released as open source.

Hopefully it will not fail this time…

Name Change

As it seems we can’t find a solution with the name problem, we have decided to simply rename this project.

We have renamed it to the internal project code name we already have used:

Xteq5

This simply stands for “Xteq Systems Project Number 5”, because it’s the fifth big project we are realizing at Xteq Systems. Yes, we also liked the older name better but we are not the first company to use the internal code name.

Old posts removed

Since the focus of this project has completely changed, all old posts have been removed.

May they rest in peace.

First Post

Welcome to the all new Xteq5 blog!