I'm not sure that the statement "All generated DDL is only an approximation of that." is necessarily correct and is database engine/server-dependent. It's typi

I'm not sure that the statement "All generated DDL is only an approximation of that." is necessarily correct and is database engine/server-dependent. It's typically pretty easy to reverse-engineer the production database schema, including any vendor-specific extensions, into a SQL file that can be used to recreate an empty version of the same database schema. Furthermore, it's just as simple with most database engines/servers to use an automated tool to compare two schemas and generate a DDL script that will upgrade the old schema to the new schema. It helps immensely because such tools will avoid circular dependencies with foreign keys, etc. that may trip you up if you're trying to manually write such upgrades. Other than that, this article is spot-on. The database should be the source of all truth and yes, you need to become proficient in SQL to be a good general application developer.