How do you version-control the database schema?

writeups

• Jeff Atwood
• [1] [2] [3]

Commercial solutions

• a LOT of people recommend Red-Gate
• more

Open source solutions

• LiquiBase
• nomad
• more
• more

some ORM systems have a migrator built-in

• Rails — Rails Migrations
• Django — South

do it manually

Create your own roll-forward and rollback scripts, by hand. Requires some amount of testing.

It's best to keep a schema_version table with the database, that records which specific schema-changes have already been applied to that database. [1]