Database upgrade during deployment

I want to create an installation package of a Java application. Part of the installation involves upgrading a SQL database (Oracle) – by running a few SQL scripts. Creating the SQL scripts to do the update by itself isn’t the problem, however I need to find a way to easily run those script.

Of course Oracle has something like SQLPlus, but that would mean SQLPlus has to be installed on the machine from where the package is installed. Another problem with SQLPlus is that it’s not so userfriendly.

Using JDBC and some programming I can easily create something that would check what current version of my application is installed, and then run the needed SQL scripts to upgrade the database. However, even easy things take some time and I’d think there are already some existing solutions.

I was about to ask a question on stackoverflow, but before I finished typing my question stackoverflow already came up with a similar question: Update a backend database on software update with Java. I’ll have to try out on of the suggested solutions, Liquibase, dbmigrate and maybe Autopatch.