The database change management is done by the DBA usually although the request for database change comes from the users of the application. Database change request from the DBA himself is very rare. It occurs only when he needs to deal with performance and when he needs to include new features and technologies. However the database change management is the sole work of the Database administrator.

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There are many factors that a DBA has to consider when affecting a database change. He has to consider, pro-activity, intelligence, planning, automation, standardization etc. The job of a DBA is very difficult when effecting the database changes.

Changing the structure of the database is not very easy and most of the RDBMS today do not support fast structural changes in the database. Just think whether you can insert a column in the middle of the table easily. In that case you might need to drop the table and if you drop the table all the data will be gone. You have to backup the data before doing so. When you drop the table, all the indexes also will be dropped. So you have to recreate the indexes. You also need to consider the security part for the table. You have to create that too again.

There are many database changes that are requested like, modifying a stored procedure or user-defined function, change portioning, moving a database to another server, changing a column’s properties, changing the keys etc. Most of the organizations will be having multiple copies of a database and at the minimum they will be having a copy for testing and another for production. Any update to the testing database has to be done to the production database too. If they are having multiple copies then each of the copy has to be updated with the change. This is a tedious task.

There are automated products to implement the database change. With such a product, a change in one database can be implemented for another database also with minimal effort. This product enables the DBA to focus on the issues alone. Apart from that the impact of the change can also be analyzed with such products. Hence database change management can be done with such tools.