I used a home-grown system that essentially 'versioned' the database schema and initial configuration data. The program queried the database on startup, creatin

I used a home-grown system that essentially 'versioned' the database schema and initial configuration data. The program queried the database on startup, creating and/or altering as needed to get to the current version the program expected. Sometimes, certain upgrades required manual/offline steps to be taken - the program noted this in the log and shut down until that version upgrade was completed. This used our home grown query library, which was a pretty thin layer over raw SQL. This was a huge enabler for testing. Today, I'd probably use FlywayDB if I needed to do that.