On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 21:10:14 +0100 Andy Heath andyheathoss@axelrod.plus.com wrote:
On 13/07/2011 19:25, Metzler, David wrote:
Every DB export will be different. There are even session variables in the DB, so it's not like you can use it to track changes. What difference does it make which backup methodology you choose as long as you've tested the restore? I assume that's what you're using it for, since it really doesn't make sense from the version control perspective.
This is very useful, thankyou David - no I hadn't realised this - the point about session variables puts it all in perspective for me.
So if I *did* want to use it from a version control perspective I'd need to be able to extract the content in some non-permeable form …
It is still possible to use database dumps to do some sort of version control for the database. The "ever changing" data is located only in some tables. Most of them are caches or session tables that can be truncated without further consequences. So you can make a dump of the database that excludes the data (=rows) from certain tables. This dump will be (nearly) constant as long as the configuration doesn't change and no content is added.
"drush sql-dump --ordered-dump" together with a good list of structure-tables would do the trick - with one exception that is mentioned here: http://drupal.org/node/1132238
roman