If I had tooling which I trusted to be able to transition from any schema state I might want to use to any other such state, I would happily use it. I've never

If I had tooling which I trusted to be able to transition from any schema state I might want to use to any other such state, I would happily use it. I've never found any, though it's a few years since I last looked. (I use Postgres, which has a fairly rich set of possible schema objects, and adds new bits frequently; I'd be reluctant to rely on a project that wasn't actively maintained and starting from 100% support). The principle here is that in this case (as often), it's much easier to teach a computer to check that you've done manual work correctly than it is to teach the computer to solve the general problem. This has been working well for me for many years, but I'm typically only dealing with a few dozen schema changes (in production) a year; I can imagine that Facebook sees the world just slightly differently.