Mercurial and Oracle Apps version control (lot's of DDL)

[Joe Ferr]

Note that this question/issue in general probably applies to any version control tool which controls trees (Mercurial, Subversion, git etc) rather than files  (e.g. CVS, Clearcase).

We are primarily an Oracle ERP apps shop.  We use Clearcase but I am interested in looking at Mercurial (I use it myself for source code control of internally used perl/python scripts) because of performance issues with Clearcase.  With Oracle ERP most of the "code" used to customize ERP apps is actually Oracle DB DML/DDL.

For example, we have something like 900 custom Oracle DB packages.  If we need to make a change, it may involve changes to one or more of these packages.  At "build" time, we need to execute a "create or replace package..." script for every package which has changed.

We currently use a workflow based tool (HP PPM aka Mercury IT Governance aka Kintana) to drive our process.  With Clearcase a developer requests one or more file/revision combinations from Clearcase via the tool and the tool executes (at the appropriate place/time after approvals etc) SQLplus which runs/executes the script(s) and routes in the workflow based on whether the script executed successfully (determined via Unix error code).

So, just having access to the code tree (say a branch which "looks like" production) doesn't handle this since I really need the files (not a list of files, the files) which have been added or modified since the previous deployment.  For reporting/visibility end users or QA personal need to easily see which DDL scripts have been executed (e.g. diffs).

First off, I'm trying to figure out whether I'm missing some simple way of handling this.  I'm trying to think of a clean "Mercurial" way of doing this which doesn't involve lots of scripting since QA (and some developers) won't want to execute complex shell/perl scripts to view this info (plus we are multi platform so it would have to work on Windows and Unix).

Any help suggestions are appreciated.
Thanks!

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