I have a simple situation. A large organisation is using several different versions of some (desktop) application and each version has it's own database structure. There are about 200 offices and each office will have it's own version, which can be one of 7 different ones. The company wants to upgrade all applications to the latest versions, which will be version 8.

The problem is that they don't have a separate database for each version. Nor do they have a separate database for each office. They have one single database which is handled by a dedicated server, thus keeping things like management and backups easier. Every office has it's own database schema and within the schema there's the whole database structure for their specific application version. As a result, I'm dealing with 200 different schema's which need to be upgraded, each with 7 possible versions. Fortunately, every schema knows the proper version so checking the version isn't difficult.

But my problem is that I need to create upgrade scripts which can upgrade from version 1 to version 2 to version 3 to etc... Basically, all schema's need to be bumped up one version until they're all version 8. Writing the code that will do this is no problem. the challenge is how to create the upgrade script from one version to the other? Preferably with some automated tool. I've examined RedGate's SQL Compare and Altova's DatabaseSpy but they're not practical. Altova is way too slow. RedGate requires too much processing afterwards, since the generated SQL Script still has a few errors and it refers to the schema name. Furthermore, the code needs to become part of a stored procedure and the code generated by RedGate doesn't really fit inside a single procedure. (Plus, it's doing too much transaction-handling, while I need everything within a single transaction.

I have been considering using another SQL Comparison tool but it seems to me that my case is just too different from what standard tools can deliver. So I'm going to write my own comparison tool. To do this, I'll be using ADOX with Delphi to read the catalogues for every schema version in the database, then use this to write the SQL Statements that will need to upgrade these schema's to their next version. (Comparing 1 with 2, 2 with 3, 3 with 4, etc.) I'm not unfamiliar with generating SQL-Script-Generators so I don't expect too many problems. And I'll only be upgrading the table structures, not any of the other database objects.

So, does anyone have some good tips and tricks to apply when doing this kind of comparisons? Things to be aware of? Practical tips to increase speed?