For application lifecycle management, an organization will need to maintain multiple copies of an application for various purposes such as development, staging, production, and testing. Each of these databases must adhere to different standards. For example, for production databases, it is essential to ensure adherence to proper production control procedures. That is, you will want to detect if someone has dropped an index without required approvals or without following appropriate procedures. In such cases, viewing changes to production day over day or week over week to audit changes being made to the databases becomes vital. Change Management allows creating baselines and comparisons that help solve these problems.
Typically, most applications will get upgraded over time. Also, most applications are customized by the end user to suit their needs. Customization requires direct access to database objects or PL/SQL modules supplied by the application vendor. The application vendor supplies the upgrade scripts and the customer has very little transparency about the impact of the upgrade procedure on their customizations. When customers test-upgrade databases, they can capture a baseline of the application schema before and after the upgrade. A comparison of the before and after baselines will tell the user what modules were changed by the application. This gives them a better idea on how their customizations will be impacted as a result of upgrading their application.
A dictionary synchronization will synchronize differences in database object definitions between a database and a baseline. Synchronizations are generated using synchronization specifications. For synchronizations, the scope specification does not include the names of individual objects. It can only specify the types, and the schemas to be included or excluded. You can additionally supply a prefix to limit the objects selected to those whose names start with that prefix.
Dictionary synchronizations synchronize differences in any attribute value between objects of any type. Use synchronization specifications to create multiple versions of a synchronization. Each version has a unique version number and a synchronization date. Use these versions to associate synchronizations of database/schemas made over time.
Related Topics
Dictionary Synchronization Best Practices
Dictionary Synchronization Features
Enterprise Manager Information Roadmap
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