Have you looked at dzo (http://sourceforge.net/projects/dzo), it have solution for some of the problems addressed here. It compares a file with native sql-code (create table ..., create view ..., grant ...) for all database objects in the schema with the actual database-schema and shows (or executes) the needed sql to transform the database schema to the sql in the file. It have support for lookup data (called referencedata in dzo), ie data that the application just reads. Dzo supports at the moment MySql, Oracle and Sql Server.