At work, I occasionally need to move database changes from the development server to the live server.  We have about a hundred tables, which makes it difficult to review by hand.  So there is a comparison script that basically runs a `mysqladmin` schema dump on both databases and then diffs the two files.  The result is a little difficult to decipher at times and still requires manual scripting to make the final ALTER commands.

What if I could run a PHP script that would compare any two schemas and generate proper ALTER commands to correct the two of them.  I would probably use some combination of these SQL commands:

• SHOW TABLES
• SHOW CREATE TABLE ‘tablename’
• SHOW COLUMNS FROM ‘tablename’

I’m going to have to think about this tonight.  Maybe punch out a test script tomorrow.