change management

Well, business is good I guess. We're getting ready to deploy a few new
installations of our software which is raising some questions. Most of them
I have answers to, but one area of development I haven't had to deal with
much is managing changes to the database structure.

I would really like to know what others consider "best practice" for
distributing changes to database structure and data. Currently we have one
production server and one test server. We simply copy and paste our
database change queries to get the same result on both servers.

I'm also concerned with the differences of sequence values. There are a
couple of tables that will need to be "replicated" from time to time. For
now data will get copied from one master server out to several other
installations. There may come a point some day when the other installations
add data to these tables that may or may not need to get pushed back to the
main server.

Any suggestions?

Matthew Nuzum | Makers of "Elite Content Management System"
www.followers.net | View samples of Elite CMS in action
matt(at)followers(dot)net | http://www.followers.net/portfolio/