Doctrine schema update or Doctrine migrations

Question

What are the practical advantages of Doctrine Migrations over just running a schema update?

Safety?

The orm:schema-tool:update command (doctrine:schema:update in Symfony) warns

This operation should not be executed in a production environment.

but why is this? Sure, it can delete data but so can a migration.

Flexibility?

I thought I could tailor my migrations to add stuff like column defaults but this often doesn't work as Doctrine will notice the discrepancy between the schema and the code on the next diff and stomp over your changes.

Answer 1

When you are using the schema-tool, no history of database modification is kept, and in a production/staging environment this is a big downside.

Let's assume you have a complicated database structure in a live project. And in the next changeset you have to alter the database somehow. For example, your users' contact phones need to be stored in a different format, not a VARCHAR, but three SMALLINT columns for country code, area code and the phone number.

Well, that's not so hard to figure out a query that would fetch the current data, separate it into three values and insert them back. That's when migrations come into play: you can create your new fields, then do the transforms and finally drop the field that was holding the data before.

And even more! You can even describe the backwards process (the down migration), when you need to undo the changes introduced in your migration. Let's assume that someone somewhere relied heavily on the format of the VARCHAR field, and now that you've changed the structure, his piece of code is not working as expected. So, you run migration:down, and everything gets reverted. In this specific case you'd just bring back the old VARCHAR column and concatenate the values back, and then drop the fields.

Doctrine's migration tool basically does most of the work for you. When you diff your schema, it generates all the necessary up's and down's, so only thing you'll have to do is handle the data that could be damaged when the migration is applied.

Also, migrations are something that gives other developers on your team knowledge on when it's time to update their schemas. With just the schema-tool, your teammates would have to run doctrine:schema:update each and every time they pull, `cause they wouldn't know if the schema has really changed.

When using migrations, you always see that there are some updates in the migrations folder, which means you need to update your schema.

Answer 2

I think that you indeed nailed it on Safety. With Migrations you can go back to another state of the table (just like you can do in Git version control). With the schema update command you can only UPDATE the tables. There is no log kept for going back in case of a failure with already saved data in those tables. I don't know exactly, but doesn't a migration also saves the data of the corresponding table that's being updated? That would be essential in my opinion, otherwise there is no big reason to use them.

So yes, I personally think that the main reason for using migrations in a production environment is safety and maybe a bit of flexibility. Safety would be the winner here I think :)

Hope this helps.

edit: Here is another answer with references to the Symfony docs: Is it safe to use doctrine2 migrations in production environment with symfony2 and php