SPUG: Version control white paper

[Andrew Sweger]

I'm not sure if the inner workings of CVS would apply as well to versioned
database objects. The traditional inner workings of CVS are based on rcs
(co, ci), diff, and ed. Those man pages give some information on the
revision file format (all those *,v files in the repository). There is a
project working on building a replacement of CVS called subversion that
may change some of these internal semantics (maybe).

  http://subversion.tigris.org/

It goes way beyond CVS and trys to answer those, "Why can't CVS do this?,"
questions.

The method of database object versioning that I have seen involved using a
pair of columns (fields) to bracket the period for which a row (record) is
valid. Usually these are date/time fields. There are several strategies
depending on an applications needs. I can try to explain more separately
if your interested.

At one time PostgreSQL had built in support for record versioning that
permitted rolling back the state of the database with respect to time. I
think this may have been dropped in recent versions in lieu of
performance.

On Thu, 25 Oct 2001, Peter Darley wrote:

> 	I'm putting together a system with perl/postgresql that will need to have a
> good mechanism for maintaining multiple versions of database objects, which
> is something that is quite new to me.  I have been searching the net to find
> a white paper explaining the inner workings of CVS, without describing the
> actual code implementation, and have drawn a blank.  I was hoping that
> someone on this list could point me to such a thing, or to any white
> paper/algorithm discussion of other version control systems.

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.



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