“Diffing” objects from a relational database

Question

Our win32 application assembles objects from the data in a number of tables in a MySQL relational database. Of such an object, multiple revisions are stored in the database.

Answer 1

Just an idea, but would it be worthwhile for you to convert the two object versions being compared to some text format and then comparing these text objects using an existing diff program - like diff for example? There are lots of nice diff programs out there that can offer nice visual representations, etc.

So for example

Text version of Object 1:

first_name: Harry
last_name: Lime
address: Wien
version: 0.1

Text version of Object 2:

first_name: Harry
last_name: Lime
address: Vienna
version: 0.2

The diff would be something like:

3,4c3,4
< address: Wien
< version: 0.1
---
> address: Vienna
> version: 0.2