This is a good place for these kinds of questions. There is also
StackOverflow - tag your question 'liquibase'. There are many
more people on StackOverflow, so you may get quicker response there
rather than here.
On to your question. As with most things, the answer is 'it
depends'. How do you want to use Liquibase? If you intend to use
the XML changelog format and enforce that all changes to all database
instances are made by developers/DBAs making additions to the XML
changelog (or included XML files) then one of the simplest things to
do would be to just use the standard XML 'entity include'
mechanism. To do that, you would declare the 'standard'
columns as an XML entity, and then everywhere you use the createTable
tag, you include the entity with the standard columns.
This of course leaves you open to mistakes and other issues.
- what if someone forgets to include the standard columns? Do you
have some other mechanism to check that they are there before
deploying to a given database?
- what if the set of standard columns changes in the future? How
will you approach that?
Steve Donie
Principal Software Engineer
Datical, Inc. http://www.datical.com/
Datical, Inc. http://www.datical.com/