Ant, Groovy and the Database

When you are using Ant to cope with databases then you probably might feel the need to read Ant properties from the database with some lines of SQL. So Ant scripts can be controlled by values from the database. For instance one may query a version table to decide whether a deployment script can succeed or fail.

With Groovy and it’s SQL module it’s quite simple to do this. The following example shows how to query all parameters from Oracle’s NLS_DATABASE_PARAMETERS table and use them as properties within an Ant script.