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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

Could you describe how you actually intend to version the database in any sort of technical language? There are existing methods of doing RDMBS versioning and I don't know of any that have tried using git.

If you want to do something that makes no sense, asking for money to do it doesn't make it more realistic.

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VersionPress is a combination of hooks, own text format and custom PHP code that manages Git and makes it all work together. VersionPress extracts information from the database, stores is in a format that is suitable for diffing and merging and versions that in a Git repository. So we do not version control db files themselves but rather the information inside the database. Sorry if you find the term "database versioning" technically incorrect, we just had to call it something simple that would still be relatively close to the technical truth.

I'll prepare a blog post on how VersionPress attacks the versioning problem technically.

A conceptually simple way to version a relational database and keep the versions in Git (or any other VCS) is to reduce each version to a set of SQL scripts that build the database from scratch to its current state, and then commit those scripts to the Git (or other VCS) repository.

To make it tractable to do so with small, frequent, incremental changes to a DB, you'd need to be smart about tracking which scripts need to change rather than running a process to reduce the whole DB to scripts each commit.

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