Indeed, although you can take it a step further than just diff'ing. Following the philosophy of infrastructure-as-code, a fully declarative approach would be a

Indeed, although you can take it a step further than just diff'ing. Following the philosophy of infrastructure-as-code, a fully declarative approach would be a repository of schema files, and tooling that can convert changes to the repo to actual DDL, which it then knows how to execute safely (even taking into account multiple dev/stage/prod environments, sharding, etc). I built a tool called Skeema that does this, although it only supports MySQL / MariaDB / Percona Server for now. https://github.com/skeema/skeema/ https://github.com/skeema/skeema/ It's currently a stateless CLI tool, using git-like semantics: you can pull from a db to the filesystem, or push from the filesystem to a db / environment, or diff to preview what DDL would be generated. But the next iteration may include integration with CI/CD workflows, Github API, etc for a more seamless workflow. e.g. if you want to add a column to a table, create a pull request modifying the file, and the tooling automatically applies the DDL to a staging environment. Then get your PR reviewed/approved, and once you merge to master the tooling automatically applies the DDL to production.