One of my favorite blogs of late is Jeff Atwood’s Coding Horror. Jeff is the programmer’s programmer. He writes brilliantly about everything software related, from technical subjects to user experience and more. I highly highly highly recommend subscribing to his blog.

Recently, Jeff wrote about the importance of database version control. I wholeheartedly agree with him. After all, your database is just as important as your code. In reality, versioning your database isn’t that hard a practice really. Whenever you create your database objects, simply script them out and place them in your application with your source code. I’m working on getting better at this myself, as Jeff’s post got me thinking about it. I currently have the database for this site under version control, and I’m trying to make an effort at work to do this, although nothing has really come up recently that would warrant this.

Bottom line is, your database deserves as much attention as your source code. It makes sense, and it’s not that hard to do. Subversion is your friend

Update: So in my reading on this subject, I came across a tool that looks very cool and very powerful. It’s called Liquibase, and I’m definitely going to have to check this one out.