Hi!

The other guys around might correct me, but from my personal
experience is that things like this are seldom worth the effort to
do them generically... Too much knowledge about the actual database
structure and the intended upgrades have to be hard-coded into the
application.

If you want to do it in Java, just grab your db connection with the
familiar Class.forName() scheme and start issuing those statements.
You can get the metadata from the Connection object via getMetaData().

One caveat is that you will obviously need a JDBC driver that
supports the metadata you require, not all drivers do. And you
should be aware that most DBMS don't support transactions on DDL
statements like ALTER TABLE and the like, so you should be certain
you know what you are doing before running the beast.

Regards,

    Phil

I would avoid copying tables if at all possible. in stead, it's better
to adopt an approach of only making schema changes that go forward -
i.e. adding new objects, increasing column sizes (but not decreasing
them), adding only nullable columns or columns with default values
etc.

copying data may require extra space, which will slow it down, and
actually may fail you if the DBA hasn't allocated 2x disk space to the
DB.

also, you may want to make sure a current backup exists (some vendors
let you check that - but not in a standard way), or perhaps consider
adding a backup step to your own app.

hope this helps
T