[sweatybridge]

> it doesn’t tell you the consequences of changing an attribute (database restart or other downtime-inducing stuff)

Modern diff tools are designed to provide better guardrails in these situations. For eg, pg-schema-diff [0] tries to generate zero downtime migrations by using lock-free migrations and warns you about potentially hazardous migrations.

I think it's good direction to bake these best practices into the tooling itself, rather than relying purely on the experiences of engineers.

[0] https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff

[evanelias]

This is exactly the key point. Declarative schema management is typically better at catching hazardous operations, because declarative schema management tools inherently require the ability to introspect your desired CREATE definitions and also introspect the current database state.

Once a tool has those abilities, adding linters and destructive-action guardrails is much easier. Especially when compared to a traditional migration tool, which often has no underlying understanding of the ALTER TABLE operations being requested.