Mahmoud A. El-Sayed introduces the Oracle 11g package, DBML_COMPARISON, which compares database objects, thus:
The DBMS_COMPARISON package can compare the following types of database objects:
a- Tables
b- Single-table views
c- Materialized views
d- Synonyms for tables, single-table views, and materialized viewsThe DBMS_COMPARISON package cannot compare data in columns of the following data types:
a- LONG
b- LONG RAW
c- ROWID
d- UROWID
e- CLOB
f- NCLOB
g- BLOB
h- BFILE
i- User-defined types (including object types, REFs, varrays, and nested tables)
j- Oracle-supplied types (including any types, XML types, spatial types, and media types)
You may also be interested in the Oracle documentation on DBML_COMPARISON – Oracle.
Merging presumes some comparison step so I commend this to you if you are in an Oracle environment.
Thoughts on the data type exclusions from comparison? Documentation says they are excluded but I didn’t see any hint at a reason for the exclusion.
I first saw this at DZone.