Database versioning

How to track and control changes to databases?

Versioning and sorted changes

You should have the complete schema in its latest version. You will also have changes separate, and they must be stored in a sequenced way. Database changes is not mutual independent.

Release for a group of artifacts

How to make sure that artifact that belongs to a specific version of the database and its composition is kept together?

Good question. I like the idea that the application by itself recognizes the database version (by using a table in the database or something) and exerts changes by itself. I would never have done it if a lot of money is at stake. Database changes does not run in a transaction, and it is relative catastrophic if it is done in a high traffic period or if it faults and no one is there to notice.

Atlassian is doing it that way. I am not aware of any standard tools that does that for you, but I have not been searching for those kind of tools.

As a minimum the application should kill itself if it wants a newer database version than it has.

The latter sounds like a good suggestion. The first sounds a little risky by my taste. (It is always much traffic and money involved when we speak big Oracle-clusters. :P)