Schema conformance for database servers

• US 20060161558A1
• Filed: 01/14/2005
• Published: 07/20/2006
• Est. Priority Date: 01/14/2005
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Microsoft Technology Licensing LLC (Microsoft Corporation)
• Original Assignee: Microsoft Corporation
• Inventors: Vitaldevara, Krishna C., Srivastava, Durgesh, Tamma, Leela S.
• Granted Patent: US 7,418,461 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 1/1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0709 in a distributed system consisting of a plurality of standalone computer nodes, e.g. clusters, client-server systems
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0751 Error or fault detection not based on redundancy power supply failures G06F1/30; network fault management H04L41/06
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 11/0778 Dumping, i.e. gathering error/state information after a fault for later diagnosis
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/211 Schema design and management
• CPC Class Codes: Y10S 707/99952 Coherency, e.g. same view to multiple users

Abstract

Automatically determining the conformance of database server schema. Maintaining conformance of database schema helps manage and sustain database driven services and applications. Schema for a pair of randomly selected databases are generated and compared. A diffgram is generated from the difference of the database schema. An alarm message can then be sent to an alarm server with the differences of the comparable databases. A master schema dump can be compared to selected database servers within the database system concurrently with the comparable database pair schema processing. A diffgram is generated in response to the comparison between the selected database schema and the master schema.

Claims

1. A method for determining the conformance of a server, comprising:

retrieving a first set of schema information from a first database server;

retrieving a second set of schema information from a second database server;

comparing the first set of schema information to the second set of schema information;

generating a difference file responsive to said step of comparing the first and second set of schema information; and

generating an alarm responsive to the difference file.

2. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

selecting the first database server and the second database server from a list of comparable database servers.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the first set of schema information is master schema information from a master schema server, said step of comparing including comparing the master schema information to the second set of schema information.

4. The method of claim 3, further comprising:

selecting a third database server having a third set of schema and a fourth database server having a fourth set of schema from a list of comparable database servers;

comparing the third set of schema information to the fourth set of schema information; and

generating a second difference file responsive to said step of comparing the third and fourth set of schema information.

5. The method of claim 4, wherein the second difference file is a diffgram.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the first database server and second database server are randomly selected from the list of comparable database servers.

7. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

retrieving server topology information, the first database server and the second database server selected from the server topology information.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the difference file is a diffgram.

9. The method of claim 1, wherein the alarm includes the difference file.

10. The method of claim 1, wherein the database servers are SQL servers.

11. The method of claim 1, further comprising:

repairing a database server associated with schema information that differs from a database server having conforming schema information.

12. A system for determining the conformance of a server, comprising:

a plurality of database servers, each of said plurality of database servers including server information;

a comparator engine configured to perform a comparison of database server schema of one or more of said plurality of servers, the database server schema derived from the server information from each server; and

a difference file generator responsive to said comparator device.

13. The system of claim 12, further comprising:

a storage device having server topology information, said comparator engine configured to compare database server schema from one or more of said plurality of database servers selected from the server topology information.

14. The system of claim 12, further comprising:

a master schema source having a master schema set, said comparator device configured to compare database server schema from one of the plurality of database servers to said master schema set.

15. The system of claim 12, wherein said comparator device is configured to compare database server schema of one of the plurality of database servers to server schema of another of the plurality of database servers.

16. The system of claim 12, wherein said difference file generator generates a difference file in response to comparing the database server schema.

17. The system of claim 16, wherein the difference file is a diffgram.

18. The system of claim 12, wherein said comparator engine is configured to perform a comparison of database server schema between a first database server and a second database server of said plurality of servers and perform a comparison of a third database server schema to a master schema, the third database server included in the plurality of servers.

19. The system of claim 12, further comprising:

an alarm generator responsive to the difference file generator.

20. The system of claim 19, wherein said alarm generator is configured to generate an alarm in response to receiving difference file information from said difference file generator.