Currently, versions of schema_migrations are kept in structure.sql as one big insert statement at the bottom of the structure.sql. When multiple developers are modifying the db schema on feature branches, you usually end up with a bunch of conflicts around that insert.
At some point in my career, I landed in a Rails project which was undergoing some serious db structure overhaul and touching anything db-related as a pure nightmare - I often resolved conflicts in structure.sql multiple times a day. As an act of desperation, I stole some code from Gitlab - as they solved this pain a while ago (only for Postgres though, but let’s focus on idea rather than implementation details for each db adapter for now).
I still believe this is a problem worth addressing, but having some 3rd party alternative solution is a losing battle unless I (we?) join you .
What do you think about having such a feature behind another configuration flag? Something aside from config.active_record.schema_format - maybe config.active_record.schema_version_format (sql / file?) or similar.
References:
- Conflict-free schema version handling (!30109) · Merge requests · GitLab.org / GitLab · GitLab
- Development change: Database schema version handling outside of structure.sql (#218590) · Issues · GitLab.org / GitLab · GitLab
- Support multiple DBs for loading/dumping of schema_migrations/ (!64884) · Merge requests · GitLab.org / GitLab · GitLab