In every project of mine with databases, I use a tool to export the schema (without data) as a text SQL file on every commit (as a pre-commit hook), to record a

In every project of mine with databases, I use a tool to export the schema (without data) as a text SQL file on every commit (as a pre-commit hook), to record any changes. There's no reason you can't do the same but including the content too. That way you're always committing a text friendly version of the database rather than the database binary encoding. And your diffs will work great.