Welcome to the Flynn project!

Flynn is a database refactoring tool. Its task is to help developers and administrators build up an application's database to a certain state.

Databases have to be updated when a new version of the application is shipped. QA has to have a certain application and database version in order to reproduce bug reports. A new database has to be set up automatically each time an automated test is being kicked off within a testing environment.

Most software projects already have some kind of database updating mechanism. Huge database scripts are executed to set up the database, certain scripts have to be be run in a certain order to alter existing databases and special update scripts have to be executed to make customer specific modifications on the database. Hopefully there is already some kind of batch processing to set up the database. But mostly user interactions are still required at some point during this process. These are all error-prone and time-consuming processes. An application developer shouldn't waste time and money managing the database with such tasks but concentrate on delivering business value to the customers. Just let Flynn do the database management stuff!

For Flynn to work you have to register update scripts in an XML file. A single call to the flynn application on the console will execute all necessary scripts to lift a database up to a desired version.

Flynn is currently in beta stage. At the moment it supports Microsoft SQL Server.

These are the planned features and abilities:

• Flexibility and extensibility to support any relational database system
• A graphical user interface to manage the database scripts
• Wizards to create standard database refactoring scripts
• A NAnt task implementation