A development source represents a state of the database in your development environment.

There are two types of development sources in Redgate Change Control:

• A development database
• A Source Control for Oracle project

Development database

If your development source is a development database, then you can work directly against this database to safely edit your schema and data using your preferred IDE. 

Redgate Change Control will compare your development database against the contents of your project in order to:

• Generate new migration scripts
• Apply migration scripts from other members of your team

Redgate Change Control requires a corresponding shadow database in order to perform these comparisons.

If you are creating a new project from within Redgate Change Control, the new project wizard will walk you through these settings.

These settings are stored inside the configuration files (.conf and .conf.user ) for your project.  You can change the development source that your project uses at any time by editing the configuration file. 

• The connection string for the database ( .developmentDatabase.connectionProvider.url  in either your .conf  or .conf.user  file).
• The connection string for the shadow database ( .deployment.shadowDatabase.connectionProvider.url  in either your .conf  or .conf.user  file).

Source Control for Oracle project

A Source Control for Oracle project defines the desired state for a database.

You may wish to use a Source Control for Oracle project as your development source to:

• Have greater control over how the Source Control for Oracle project will be deployed, instead of relying on a state-based comparison at deployment time
• Decouple making changes in development from defining how to deploy them
• Avoid creating a migration script in order to share changes with your team if you're working in a dedicated development database environment

Redgate Change Control will compare the contents of your Source Control for Oracle project against your Redgate Change Control project in order to generate new migration scripts.

Redgate Change Control will need to be configured with a shadow database in order to perform these comparisons.

If you are creating a new project from within Redgate Change Control, the new project wizard will walk you through these settings. These settings are stored inside the configuration file (.conf  or .conf.user) for your project.  You can change the development source that your project uses at any time by editing the scriptsFolder parameter in your configuration files. The scripts folder is the folder that contains the DatabaseInformation.xml file that was created by Source Control for Oracle and will contain one or more subfolders that contain the DDL scripts for each object.

• The path to the scripts folder should be under .development.scriptsFolder in either your .conf  or .conf.user  file.
• The connection string for the shadow database should be under .deployment.shadowDatabase.connectionProvider.url  in either your .conf  or .conf.user  file.