How to share MySQL database with other team members

Question

I'm a newbie to web development. My team at school is using J2EE and MySQL to develop a web app that will be deployed on AWS. We use GitHub for version control.

I am just wondering if I use MySQL from my terminal to add tables into the local "test" database, how can my teammates have access to them? Should I deploy the database somewhere or maybe create the tables in code so that my teammates can automatically have the tables in their local database when they run the code? But how can the data already stored in the database be shared then?

Sorry to have this naive question, I tried to do some research online but it seems that the results are more advanced and about PHP not J2EE... It will also be great if you can recommend some good resource for me to read through since I believe this is a very fundamental concept that I should know.

Answer 1

You can maintain the database's schema in your code so it can be committed to source control and accessed by the others. This is a good practice regardless of how you use a test database for the development.

Your team members will not be able to easily access your local database. For a distributed development environment it would be best to host your test database on a remote server, such as on an EC2 instance in a public subnet or in RDS. Then you can pass along the database's connection information (host, port) and credentials to the other team members.

Pay attention to the security group when creating the database either in EC2 or RDS. You can open it up to the world (0.0.0.0) or narrow it to just your team members' IP addresses to tighten security. Otherwise the team members will not be able to connect to the database.

Answer 2

You can create a test environment using VM or containers and share it with your team members. You should pay attention to how to keep track of the changes in these test environments as well. The following answer describes how a db with schema can be shared using a docker image. You can version control these images so you can track the changes.

Answer 3

It's hard for your team members to access your local database from another computer. It's a lot better to host your database on a remote server, such as a EC2 on AWS or Computer Engine on GCP. Then you MySQL database can be accessed by anyone with an authorized connection and whitelisted IP address.

Another solution is using a cloud-based data warehouse like a Snowflake or Acho Studio. Once you have the MySQL database connected to the DW, your teammates should be able to access the tables you've authorized them to see.

This way you can also share your SQL queries with your teammates so they can run them against the MySQL server themselves.