Rails-like Database Migrations?

Question

Is there any easy to install/use (on unix) database migration tools like Rails Migrations? I really like the idea, but installing ruby/rails purely to manage my database mig

Answer 1

I haven't personally done it, but it should be possible to use ActiveRecord::Migration without any of the other Rails stuff. Setting up the load path correctly would be the hard part, but really all you need is the rake tasks and the db/migrate directory plus whatever Rails gems they depend on, probably activerecord, actviesupport and maybe a couple others like railties. I'd try it and just see what classes are missing and add those in.

At a previous company we built a tool that did essentially what ActiveRecord::Migration does, except it was written in Java as a Maven plugin. All it did was assemble text blobs of SQL scripts. It just needs to be smart about the filenames going in order and know how to update a versioning table.