Migrations

Migrations are the result of changes to your database models.

In drorm, migrations are represented by an agreed-upon declarative format using TOML as file format. These files can be generated by the make-migrations tool.

You can also take a look at the more in-depth introduction to the file format if you want to explore more options.

Why file based migrations?

Some ORMs choose to use an auto-migrator that tries to check the current state of the database scheme and modifies it, until it matches with its model declaration.

In the beginning this sounds like a smart idea.

there are no random files lying around.
your app is able to apply migrations on startup

but there are some drawbacks to this method:

magic applied by the auto-migrator is difficult to understand
reversing changes back to a defined state is impossible
no easy way to insert arbitrary sql, that should be executed once