Tooling on databases has been traditionally awful, and I think that has a lot to do with folks' negative experiences with the database taking up more architectu

Tooling on databases has been traditionally awful, and I think that has a lot to do with folks' negative experiences with the database taking up more architectural space. Schema migration is hard. Skeema looks cool. Aquameta's idea with schema migration is to treat the schema as data, so that each table is a meta.table table, each view is a row in the meta.view table, each column... etc. So when version control checks out a new version of the project, if columns say were added, they're just inserted at runtime. Checkout prioritizes meta entities so they happen first and in a sensible order [1] so the migration happens first. This does technically work for all scenarios (I think!), but in the case of say a column rename, it would naively delete all the values and then have to re-set them per row, which could be a big inefficiency. It would still work just fine for smaller tables though. Alternately some kind of optional migration script per commit was another idea.