SchemaCrawler Offline Catalog Snapshot

SchemaCrawler allows you to save off your database metadata into an offline catalog snapshot, for future use, using the serialize command. Later, you can connect to this offline catalog snapshot as you would to a regular database. This allows you to store historical versions of your schema, or to query your database even if you no longer have access to it. Please make sure that you use the same version of SchemaCrawler to serialize snapshots as you use when you load those offline catalog snapshots. Also make sure that the serialization was done using the binary Java serialization format, and not the YAML or JSON formats.

You can use any of the rich SchemaCrawler functionality with offline catalog snapshots, including grep, diagramming, scripting, templating and producing output in a variety of formats.

How to Create an Offline Catalog Snapshot

Use the serialize command with --output-format=ser to serialize the database schema metadata into a binary Java serialization format file. It is best to create the snapshot with the --info-level=maximum and no limit, filter or grep options.

Important: The offline catalog snapshot should should have been created with the same version of SchemaCrawler that you will use to load it.

How to Use an Offline Catalog Snapshot

In order to connect to an offline catalog snapshot, use the offline database server type, and then use any SchemaCrawler command that you would like to use. You can apply limit, filter or grep options too.

Use the following command-line options to “connect” to your offline catalog, assuming that you have previously serialized to a file called “offline_db.ser”: --server=offline --database=offline_db.ser No username and password are required.