A lot of databases have many simple tables that migrations work fine for. Even though you will have to go back and write some SQL code to insert Foreign Keys and such, it’s code you would have had to write regardless – except now you’ve just cut out a lot of the tedious parts. The issue comes in with how do we make it easier to implement simple yet necessary things such AS foreign keys.

For the developers who neglect the database/datastore – then those are very, VERY uninformed developers. You can argue that the database IS the application. Without data, you’ve got nothing. If a developer doesn’t know SQL (at least the very basic), then he’s probably a drag and drop designer, not a developer.

Although the criticisms are well deserved of migrations, dismissing them is beyond stupid. Instead of the pointless “script kiddies” banter, people should look at migrations and say “hmm, this isn’t a bad idea. How can we make this better?” I’ve seen my share of “professionals” who don’t know anything (e.g. attaching a database). I believe migrations are a step in the right direction for making our work easier and cutting out a lot of the repetitive tasks. Is it perfect? No. When someone out there decides to polish it up, and call it something like dbBuilder and it becomes a widely used pattern/protocol/software/etc, I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

And no, outside of small hobby projects, I’m new to Rails. I’m on the Microsoft enterprise side of things for my day job.

I agree that migrations are helpful, especially in the beginning of a project. When you have so less data that no one notices dropping a database and recreating the database from a dump.

Doing things manually means that normal rake db:something doesn’t work. Last time I made my own sql in a rails migration, I noticed that later rake db:schema:dump doesn’t load that changes to a file. So once using your own sql, you have to remember that and later make dumps without rake db:schema:dump && load. Maybe you know some better way to accomplish that?

Oh yea, if I would have spare time

Yes, my point of view is partly changed by my partly DBA background. This is because the most important thing in every application is the database, of course if the application uses the database. And this is the fact, not the DBA point of view. Data is usually carefully maintained, while it is used by many applications in many different ways. Data is migrated from one database to another, while applications are sometimes thrown away.

Migrations are really nice and can help programmer to write some code changing databases without knowing any sql. For me this is not an advantage – this way you just don’t use your database specific features (e.g. you buy an expensive oracle licence just for using the database like sqlite).

And I fully agree with the last paragraph: you can use databases and write programms fast, cheap or good – choose two of those. The rails migrations like look now allow for fast and cheap – that doesn’t mean good programming. Migrations are becoming better and better, some time ago one migration wasn’t run in a transaction – now it uses transactions. Maybe one day rails will be the best framework with the best migrations ever created. In my opinion now it is not, althought it is quite useful tool.

i work with a team of developers on a RoR project.. we have over 350 migrations and it has saved us so much time it is crazy..

i agree it is not perfect but for the (rare-ish) times that they don’t cover what you need, you can do things manually…

I recently started a Catalyst project, and migrations is one of the main things i miss about RoR..

sure you can write your own thats gonna be just perfect for your needs, but why bother when this does 95% of stuff and it is already there and works fine…

if you got spare time, you could maybe mod the rails migrations to accept plain SQL then you’ve built what you suggest is a better solution and already have all the other bits in place..

i note your other comments are from what sound like dba’s… i lol at that.. the point is migrations are *really* good, the people commenting sound like they haven’t tried doing dev with and without them…

(sure if you are a CMMI 5 shop and you have a dba team/test team/UAT team/dev team and architects, then you probably don’t need migrations but if you’re trying to get things done fast on the web with a small team, they’re perfect)

“you don’t need to know SQL”

Nice one.