Many of you are aware that for quite some time I've had available a new migrations tool called Alembic. I wrote the majority of this code last year and basically haven't had much time to work on it, save for a little bit of integration at my day job.

Alembic has several areas that improve upon the current crop of migration tools, including:

Full control over how migrations run, including multiple database support, transactional DDL, etc.

A super-minimal style of writing migrations, not requiring full table definitions for simple operations.

No monkeypatching or repurposing of core SQLAlchemy objects.

Ability to generate migrations as SQL scripts, critical for working in large organizations on restricted-access production systems.

A non-linear versioning model that allows, somewhat rudimentally, for branching and merging of multiple migration file streams.

By popular request, designs for some degree of automation will be added, where "obivous" migrations of tables or columns being added or dropped as well as simple column attribute changes can be detected and rendered into migration scripts automatically.

I get asked about migration tools quite often, and I've always mentioned that I have such a tool available in an early form, it just lacks documentation, hoping that one out of so many eager users would be able to chip in a couple of days to help get it going. Turns out it's simply not possible to get someone to document your project for you; so here at the PloneConf sprints I've taken the time at the sprints to create initial documentation. Originally I was going to do some work on Dogpile but I've literally been asked about schema migrations, either in person or via reddit or twitter, about nine times in the past three days.

The documentation for Alembic will provide an overview of the tool, including theory of operation as well as philosophy, and some indicators of features not yet implemented. I would like feedback on the current approach. Alembic is not yet released though can be checked out from Bitbucket for testing. It's a pretty simple tool, 1163 lines of code at the moment, with plenty of room to support a lot more database features in a straightforward way.

I also have an open question about the notion of "automatic" migrations - how does one discern detecting whether or not a table or column has had a name change, or if a new table/column was added and an old one dropped? Just a curiosity as I attempt to avoid reading South's source code.