What makes this better than dbdeploy and phing?

[markushausammann]

It seems to me that writing migrations with dbdeploy and phing is much less work, what are the advantages of using phpmig?

[davedevelopment]

Well, both have their benefits, here are some of them:

DBDeploy

• You only need to write SQL, DBA's who don't necessarily program can do this
• Easy to run, they're just SQL scripts

phpmig (code based)

• You can make complicated decisions based on state
• You can run complicated data transformations (sometimes leveraging existing code)
• You can prompt for user input/confirmation
• It's easier (than sticking to ANSI SQL) to write database vendor agnositic migrations using a schema tool
• You can migrate anything, xml files, document databases, binary data

[markushausammann]

Thanks, that's a very helpful comparison. Maybe nice to add it to the readme.

[davedevelopment]

No problem, hope it helps. I've tagged this issue with 'FAQ', I'll re-open it for others to see until I can get some better documentation put together.