Overview of migrating changes to a database

New applications or changes to existing applications might require structural changes to databases. As a database administrator, you might need to frequently migrate changes that were first made in the development database environment to the test environment, and then finally to the production environment.
The following figure shows the process of migrating changes from one database environment to another.
Figure 1. The process of migrating changes from one database environment to another
The database administrator examines the Development database to determine how it differs from the Test database. The database administrator then applies the changes that were found to the Test database.

This task of migrating changes requires you to determine the differences between the two database environments and to change only those objects that are different. In some cases, determining the differences might be easy, such as when only a new table has been added. In other cases, determining the differences might be much more complex, such as when numerous changes are made to multiple tables, tables have been added or dropped, primary or foreign keys have been changed, and so on.

The source of structural changes to migrate can also be from a DDL script file or a physical data model. Migrating changes from these sources requires the same steps and analysis as migrating changes from one database environment to another.

A change plan is used to migrate changes to a database. To migrate database object changes, you start the Compare and Migrate Objects wizard from the main menu. The wizard guides you through these steps:

After you have selected and copied the differences that you want to apply, you can work with the change plan. Review the changes in the change plan, determine if an object that is being changed impacts other objects, add additional changes to the change plan, and apply the changes in the change plan to the target database.

When you review and deploy the change plan, the Review and Deploy dialog opens and the generated commands, which can be customized, are displayed. You can use the features in the Review and Deploy dialog to complete these tasks:

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