Handling schema changes when working with multiple feature branches

Question

Is there another way, or some tool, to handle database schema changes in multiple parallel feature branches other than creating a separate database for each one in development?

ie. Spin up a DB in memory based on some configuration or script and populate with DbUnit before running tests.

This question is specifically targeted at unit testing, but could be applicable to UAT as well.

Answer 1

After a long while, it seems like Liquibase, in conjunction with other tools like DbUnit, should be able to accomplish what I had originally asked.

Thanks for all of the other suggestions.

Answer 2

Have you looked at the H2 database engine? If you are using Spring, you might try the approach documented here: Unit Testing JPA with in-memory H2 database (useful info, even if not using Spring). A quick google search yielded this blog post, indicating there are definitely folks out there using H2 with DbUnit.

Answer 3

We're using dbdeploy and it works extremely well for us. It helps manage db creation scripts in version control manner. It still needs a bit of work on top of it (eg. concurrent sql migration if application is deployed simultaneously on multiple nodes) but except this its works well out of the box.