G'Day all,

Thought I'd make a post to see what other people think of something I
just started to think about..  I'm developing a swing based App, at the
moment during development i'm switching between using mySql & hsqldb as
my database for the app(Just because I find the gui's available for
mysql easier to use, but the final version will be in hsqldb,maybe..)

Anyway I started to think about what happens in the future when
hopefully I have a user base and make changes to my application which
require changes to the database. Say for example I add a new column to
one of my tables, well I suppose in the startup code I can check for the
existance of that particular column and create it if it isnt there
already.  Which led me to think rather than ship a already existing
database, why dont I have a routine at startup that checks for the
existance of a database, and creates it and then checks for the
existance of each table/column.

Is this a common approach ?

It would make my life eaiser in the sense each time I make a change to
my database using mysql I also have to make the change to hsqldb, recopy
the hsqldb to my directoy used by my installer generator blah blah when
really if the change is made once in my startup procedure then it doesnt
matter what db I'm using.

Rgds,