Transferring changes from a dev DB to a production DB

Question

Say I have a website and a database of that website hosted locally on my computer (for development) and another database hosted (for production)...ie first I do the changes

Answer 1

We do this in the (Ruby on) Rails world by writing "migrations," which capture the changes you make to the DB structure at each point. These are run with a migration tool (a task for rake), which also writes to a DB table so it knows whether a particular migration has been run or not.

You could make a structure like this for your dev platform (.Net?), but I think that in other answers to this question people will suggest available tools for handling database versioning in your development platform, or perhaps for your specific DB.

I don't know any of these, but check out this list. I see a lot of pay things out there, but there must be something free. Also check this out.