[shkkmo]

I've found the doctrine migrations library to work nicely, if you are already using doctrine as an ORM. In fact, I find the simplicity of using doctrine migrations one the my favorite features of doctrine. I find myself wishing that the other parts of doctrine were as well designed and implemented.

1) It identifies migrations based on the timestamp when the migration was created. This means that it checks for any missing migrations regardless of migration 'order' while still running all needed migrations in order. It also checks for any migrations that have been run on the DB that are not in your current code base and warns you about them.

2) The migrations are simple PHP scripts that run SQL. This means that you can put whatever you want in them, easily edit them, adjust the timestamp, and manage them in your version control of choice.

3) Merging two branches with different migrations is not a problem, as long as the migrations themselves don't conflict (i.e. one changes a table or column name that the other also wants to modify). You will however have to identify the conflicts by testing the migrations together rather than just relying on your merge tool.

I'd have a hard time moving to any other migration tool that didn't offer this level of simplicity. The auto-generation of migrations based on comparing the XML schema and the DB is nice as well, but I could live without it as long as I have the other features.