Best way for data migration in sql server 2008

Question

We have an existing windows application using a database. We migrated to web application using the structure of windows application database , but made few changes like changing the table name and added few columns in tables.

Now if my customer has this windows application already installed in his system and he now migrates to web application.

My requirement is , if my customer already has the windows application database installed in his system, he need not install new database for web application.

What is the best way to migrate the changes from web application database to the already installed windows application database?

Answer 1

The simplest way is to create a script which applies all changes you made for the web app db. Then run the script when installing your web applicaion. This should work if a user is not going to use windows app any more.

In fact it's a common scenario when you have to make changes to the db with each new version of your app. So if you have to make changes to the db more and more again I would look into db versioning strategies to pick the one which suites you best if I were you.

There are also a number of versioning tools: FluentMigrator, EF Migrations, NHibernate migrations, etc.