[RandomBK]

Note that this also necessarily requires that critical variables and configuration options are stored in version control, rather than database. Bootstrapping staging databases with values necessary to run the application is a constant challenge.

Otherwise, your production environment would have massively different feature flags and other config than staging.

[mtoddsmith]

There are tools that can perform a diff of your databases and generate a change script. So we just diff local vs staging and capture the changes and check that in along with the code changes. Every change to the database create a schema change record so its easy to apply only the latest changes if they're versioned.