alt Hacker NewsBe sure to look at the actual sqldef command-line tool, not the trivial copy-and-paste demo on their website. Declarative schema management is best used combined with a Git repo.
In the big picture, declarative schema management has lots of advantages around avoiding/solving schema drift, either between environments (staging vs prod) or between shards in a sharded setup (among thousands of shards, one had a master failure at an inopportune time).
It's also much more readable to have the "end state" in your repo at all times, rather than a sequence of ALTERs.
There are a bunch of other advantages; I have an old post about this topic here: https://www.skeema.io/blog/2019/01/18/declarative/
It's also quite essential when maintaining nontrivial stored procedures. Doing that with imperative migrations is a gateway to hell. https://www.skeema.io/blog/2023/10/24/stored-proc-deployment...
Replies
Out of curiosity, the post you linked mentions that it won't work for renames. What's the approach for these and other types of procedural migrations, such as data transformations (ie: splitting a column, changing a type, etc.)
With a declarative model, would you run the migration and follow immediately with a one off script?
Yes, we've used skeema for this for many years, and it is just plain lovely. Putting into source control your desired end state is so much more intuitive and understandable than accumulating migrations. In a way it's like the difference between jQuery and React -- you just say how you want it to look like in the end, and the computer does the work to figure out how to make it so.