Some time ago I’ve been searching for a tool for automating PostgreSQL database updates. You know the drill - creating new tables, adding columns, renaming stuff, etc. Doing these things by hand is error prone and cumbersome, and sometimes not even possible, especially if you have more than one database or if you need to share your changes with more developers.

Add to that the distributed nature of development these days and you can have a lot of fun trying to figure out what a column is supposed to be called like after three different developers renamed it at the same time.

Apparently, there are a lot of tools out there trying to solve the problem of “DB schema migration”. But as I unfortunately found out after evaluating many of them, most of them did not suit my needs:

• Ability to use simple *.sql files; no complicated ORM or XML bullshit please
• Simple interface - I don’t want to type a kilometer-long command to get something done
• Database should “know” what version it is in, new changes should be applied seamlessly
• Ability to bring a pre-existing database under the change management
• Ability to revert applied changes
• Play nice with git, which means it should generate as few conflicts as possible when merging branches and resolving these conflicts should be easy
• The tool shouldn’t be bound to a particular programming language or framework
• No Java

So I kept on searching, until I stumbled upon Sqitch. It turned out that Sqitch covered most of the things in the list above.

Additionally, it supports many SQL databases (including PostgreSQL). It does not assume almost anything about the workflow it’s used in, which makes it very easy to integrate with deployment tools such as Ansible. Performing the actual update of the database schema is as simple as running sqitch --engine pg deploy. To learn how to use it I only had to read through the Sqitch tutorial - so “thumbs up”, another problem solved :-).