> I care about the authoritative data model Me too, but the truth about the world is that all inherit complexity is accompanied by incidental complexity :-/ Yo

> I care about the authoritative data model Me too, but the truth about the world is that all inherit complexity is accompanied by incidental complexity :-/ You've got a database, you need to respect it's existence. > mentally parse how rails reacts to the database schema It's hilariously straightforward in 99% of cases: For each column, a getter and setter are created. The getter directly calls read_attribute and the setter calls write_attribute. Those two methods do standard string/integer/date/etc primitive conversion. What's there to map in your head? > Manual migrations exist, and are the default. Right, that's the point I'm making. They should be the default. I'm also saying that I shouldn't have to write a migration AND maintain some declarations in the python file. > it's painfully easy to create a situation where your manual migration depends on properties of your model that have since changed. Oh, I've made this mistake. Since then, I stopped referencing my models in my migrations. I just run raw SQL (or the shorthand Ruby functions for the most common cases). As a result, my migrations are waaaay faster (batch updates rather loops, etc) and I've never had this problem since.