> I'm very curious to know why the "get the tool to work out what changes have been made" approach is so popular.
At a guess I'd say it boils down to the following: * DDL is ugly and a PITA and no-one wants to write it. This is why rails uses a DSL for migrations * Development tools often provide good tooling for making changes without scripting them (this should be easily fixed by having the tools require a "reason" for each change) * Automated tooling is quicker/more accurate than halting your entire dev team for 20 minutes while Fred is out at lunch after not committing DB changes with his code changes
