RoundhousEModes

RoundhousE Modes

RoundhousE has three modes

• Normal
• DropCreate
• RestoreRun

Let's talk about what those modes mean first. These are really concepts, a way of describing what you are doing with RoundhousE, and nothing more than that. Normal is just a run of RH, DropCreate is a /drop followed by a normal run, and RestoreRun is just /restore. Hopefully that sets the stage to continue talking about RH modes.

During initial development, it is suggested you use DropCreate mode. That means you execute a drop of a database and recreate it every time. This is suggested because you are working on the same script and making changes to it as you go, therefore you want that script to be able to change and RH is a migrator that by default does not allow you to change a script once it is run.

When you go to your integration point where you can no longer drop and create a database, you run RoundhousE in Normal mode. This means you are just applying new scripts (and the first time you are creating a database as well).

Once you have gone to production, you switch from DropCreate to RestoreRun mode if your database is small enough. If not, you can continue with the idea a maintenance mode by switching to a new script name that you are making changes to. You can also backup the structure only (and some of the lookup data if you use a tool like LiteSpeed) and restore from that.