Scripts. And I hate to tell you but despite what you’ll read on HN every single company I’ve seen and every single vendor I’ve dealt with - is using scripts.

Scripts. And I hate to tell you but despite what you’ll read on HN every single company I’ve seen and every single vendor I’ve dealt with - is using scripts. Just simple scripts, in source control, amended by hand, lord hopes applied as part of a CI system, often without any kind of version numbering (so once it’s in the database you don’t know where it came from) and with no rollback. Declarative migrations do exist. If it’s in .NET then it’s invisible to me, but I imagine it’s pretty rare. Using SSDT (Microsoft) for tooling is possible but has so many edge cases and is poorly documented so coming up with an architecture requires the kind of expert where there may literally only be a dozen in the world, so it isn’t done outside of demos that fail and get thrown out the second you’d ever try to implement them.