On my team we use numbered sql scripts. We restore a production db on our local boxes. This is the starting point. The numbered scripts are executed against th

On my team we use numbered sql scripts. We restore a production db on our local boxes. This is the starting point. The numbered scripts are executed against this. So the actual deployment is getting tested out locally all the time. This is dead reliable, and handles tricky data transformation that would fail under a declarative/calculate approach.