[rotemtam]

hey redact207 Thanks for the feedback! (one of Atlas's creators here).

First of all, I completely understand you. Good ol' SQL has been with us for decades and isn't going anywhere. In the very near future you will be able to work with Atlas in pure SQL in a few ways: 1. Use a command like `atlas schema diff` (API not final) to generate the diff SQL for you, that you can then edit and use with your favorite tools. 2. Use a CREATE TABLE statement instead of HCL for your desired schema. 3. Use Atlas with a workflow that we call "migration authoring" to author for your the migrations into your <favorite migration tool> directory format.

Second, I'd say that as much as I'd like it to be ubiquitous knowledge, many product teams don't have anyone on board with expertise like you probably have in planning migrations well, and so they can benefit greatly from a tool that will embed well tested and researched "DBA" knowledge into migration planning. The amount of outages I've heard about that are related to migrations that were ill planned is enormous.

Many have commented on this thread that it's a huge topic with a lot of subtleties and that it will be very hard to build a tool that does this well. I agree with that sentiment, but we built a strong team here at Ariga, and I hope together with the OSS community we will build something remarkable.