Migratory Schemas

It’s getting to be that time of year again… the leaves are falling, the skies are gray, the temperature’s noticably lower. It’s time for birds to make their way south. And apparently this is the migratory season for another ineffable creature, the database schema.

Kevin Clark has written an awesome article on writing migrations for your Rails applications. I highly recommend it. (Of course I let myself be scooped by the Railsblog, which is sad, but in case you didn’t follow the link from there, you should really follow it now. Really. Go ahead, I’ll wait.)

If you’re a bit out of the loop, migrations are a way to describe your database schema in Ruby code to make installing and upgrading Rails apps ever much easier. And, until now, the documentation’s all been a bit confused—and perhaps more importantly, lacking a simple voice that tied it all together.

Kevin filled the void. Thanks, bud.