Vladimir Oselsky walks through his database deployment workflow:
When it comes to actual deployment to Test and production servers, it is handled by application update program that runs scripts on the target server one by one in alphabetical order. Since we have clients running different versions, scripts always have to be applied in order, for example, if the customer is on version 1.5 before the could get 2.5 they need 2.0. This ensures that database changes are applied in correct order, and I don’t have to worry about something breaking.
One last problem that I have to deal with on a regular basis is Version-drift. This is caused when I manually patch a client for a fix without going through the proper build process. In those cases, I just have to manually merge changes into development to guarantee that it will make it out to other clients. Once in a while, it becomes quite complicated to keep track of different clients running different versions and how to ensure that if they need a fix, it is not something that could be resolved through update versus manual code changes.
Version drift can be a big pain, but check out Vlad’s workflow.