I've read and reread a great article titled "Evolutionary Database Design" on Martin Fowler's web-site [0]. This article describes database migrations as being a process. We've found that for complex changes, we'll often need a pre-migration and a post-migration (temporally being before the code change and after the code change respectively).
We commit the migrations along-side the application code and in our case we use FlywayDB [1]. The only down-side is that this tool doesn't perform roll-back operations automatically. You can always do them by writing another migration that goes forward to the past.
Another popular DB migration tool is Liquibase [2]. I don't have much experience with this tool as it doesn't fit our build pipe-line as well but it does support and encourage defining a roll-back for each migration.
EDIT: HN is the new StackOverflow? I think this is a really important question for development teams and yet I could see it being closed due to the "Questions asking for tool or library recommendations are off-topic for Stack Overflow ..." rule. Sad!
We commit the migrations along-side the application code and in our case we use FlywayDB [1]. The only down-side is that this tool doesn't perform roll-back operations automatically. You can always do them by writing another migration that goes forward to the past.
Another popular DB migration tool is Liquibase [2]. I don't have much experience with this tool as it doesn't fit our build pipe-line as well but it does support and encourage defining a roll-back for each migration.
[0] https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/evodb.html
[1] https://flywaydb.org/
[2] http://www.liquibase.org/
EDIT: HN is the new StackOverflow? I think this is a really important question for development teams and yet I could see it being closed due to the "Questions asking for tool or library recommendations are off-topic for Stack Overflow ..." rule. Sad!