Starting with versioning mysql schemata without overkill. Good solutions?

Question

I\'ve arrived at the point where I realise that I must start versioning my database schemata and changes. I consequently read the existing posts on SO about that topic but I

Answer 1

I think this question deserves a modern answer so I'm going to give it myself. When I wrote the question in 2009 I don't think Phinx already existed and most definitely Laravel didn't.

Today, the answer to this question is very clear: Write incremental DB migration scripts, each with an up and a down method and run all these scripts or a delta of them when installing or updating your app. And obviously add the migration scripts to your VCS.

As mentioned in the beginning, there are excellent tools today in the PHP world which help you manage your migrations easily. Laravel has DB migrations built-in including the respective shell commands. Everyone else has a similarly powerful framework agnostic solution with Phinx.

Both Artisan migrations (Laravel) and Phinx work the same. For every change in the DB, create a new migration, use plain SQL or the built-in query builder to write the up and down methods and run artisan migrate resp. phinx migrate in the console.