If you want to exclude one file from resource, you may use this snippet:

sourceSets {
	main {
		resources {
			exclude '**/*.bak'
		}
	}	
}

If you want to add new resource folder to Gradle build, use this snippet:

sourceSets {
	main {
		resources {
			srcDir 'src/main/java'	
		}
	}	
}

.java (.groovy and *scala) file will be skipped on build from resources.

It's easy. Just add to somewhere after your task definition:
processTestResources.dependsOn recreateDatabase

• processTestResource - default task (phase of build lifecycle)
• recreateDatabase - your custom task, that will be called before processTestResource

Introduction

dbmaintain is plugin (best for my opinion) that allowes to safely migrate dbscheme. It has excellent support for Maven and Ant but not for Gradle. But Gradle has excellent support for Ant, so we can call dbmaintain ant tasks from Gradle build script.

A small note - I prefer to not contain any libraries in my source code repository (Git currently), so dbmaintain will be loaded from the maven's central repository.

Disclaimer

This text don't cover work with dbmaintain. If you need more information about...

To build WAR by Gradle system change java plugin to war plugin:
apply plugin: 'war'
After that execute gradle:
gradle build
WAR will be in folder builds/libs/

To view dependencies hierarchy:
gradle dependencies