> For some reason, a lot of companies are largely unwilling to spend money on good database management/migration tools - even if they're paying a stack of cash

> For some reason, a lot of companies are largely unwilling to spend money on good database management/migration tools - even if they're paying a stack of cash for SQL Server. If you use SQL Server, you can do database migrations using DACPAC files. DACPAC migrations are idempotent, so you can deploy to an existing database; it will add missing columns without deleting data etc. Personally I like manual migration scripts better, for my last projects I have been successful embedding these migration scripts in the source code of the application itself, so it integrates with source control , makes it very nice to use in test and development, and avoids many of the possible mistakes with separate code and database deployments. There are many open source tools for this in .NET: I've used FluentMigrator, SqlFu and Insight Database Schema, and they all worked well.