Database tools typically do not support cross database
management. Management of any application (such as an
Electronic Medical Record) that involves software from
more than one database vendor is a challenging task.
Maintaining identical schema structures on different
databases and migrating database content among products
from different database vendors has always required
significant manual intervention from experienced
database administrators. This type of process is costly and
would certainly benefit from a cross-platform database
management tool.
Database tools may introduce their own set of
challenges, since tool capabilities and features, such as
database console access, database monitoring and
database alert computations differ vastly among tool
vendors. Database tool software vendor support is usually
inversely proportional to the database vendor user base,
and might even be non-existent for the Open Source
database software community.
This article describes a strategy for creating a single
database management application with the ability to
manage database software from any vendor, using a
common user interface for all database vendors. This
database management application is script-driven,
exclusively using Structured Query Language (SQL),
without the management tool software having any prior
(hard-coded) knowledge of the specifics and intricacies of
the database’s internal structure.