Welcome to DdlUtils

What is DdlUtils
Learning more

Important DdlUtils Status Notice

Please note: The DdlUtils project is retired. The code base is not being actively developed. There are no packaged releases of DdlUtils available from the Apache Release Distribution servers.

The DdlUtils issue tracker and mailing lists have been closed down, although old mail and issues can be viewed in the archives.

The source code repository for DdlUtils remains available, and interested parties may download the source code for education or other purposes as desired.

What is DdlUtils

DdlUtils is a small, easy-to-use component for working with Database Definition (DDL) files. These are XML files that contain the definition of a database schema, e.g. tables and columns. These files can be fed into DdlUtils via its Ant task or programmatically in order to create the corresponding database or alter it so that it corresponds to the DDL. Likewise, DdlUtils can generate a DDL file for an existing database.

DdlUtils uses the Turbine XML format, which is shared by Torque and OJB. This format expresses the database schema in a database-independent way by using JDBC datatypes instead of raw SQL datatypes which are inherently database specific. An example of such a file is:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE database SYSTEM "http://db.apache.org/torque/dtd/database.dtd">
<database name="testdb">
  <table name="author">
    <column name="author_id"
            type="INTEGER"
            primaryKey="true"
            required="true"/>
    <column name="name"
            type="VARCHAR"
            size="50"
            required="true"/>
    <column name="organisation"
            type="VARCHAR"
            size="50"
            required="false"/>
  </table>

  <table name="book">
    <column name="book_id"
            type="INTEGER"
            required="true"
            primaryKey="true"
            autoIncrement="true"/>
    <column name="isbn"
            type="VARCHAR"
            size="15"
            required="true"/>
    <column name="author_id"
            type="INTEGER"
            required="true"/>
    <column name="title"
            type="VARCHAR"
            size="255"
            defaultValue="N/A"
            required="true"/>

    <foreign-key foreignTable="author">
      <reference local="author_id" foreign="author_id"/>
    </foreign-key>  

    <index name="book_isbn">
      <index-column name="isbn"/>
    </index>
  </table>
</database>

Learning more

There are essentially two ways to use DdlUtils:

In an Ant build script via the task provided by DdlUtils. You can learn more about here.
From within your Java program, about which you can learn more here.

You're also welcome to join DdlUtils' mailing lists.