Never Too Late to Migrate
The O’Reilly Network has an excellent tutorial by Bill Walton on using migrations with Ruby on Rails.
Migrations are a way to manage the evolution of your database schema. (And it will evolve.) As the Rails documentation on migrations explains: “It’s a solution to the common problem of adding a field to make a new feature work in your local database, but being unsure of how to push that change to other developers and to the production server. With migrations, you can describe the transformations in self-contained classes that can be checked into version control systems and executed against another database that might be one, two, or five versions behind.”
Walton’s tutorial steps you through the process using an uncomplicated and conversational approach. You can use Ruby on Rails without using migrations. But if you are in multi-developer or SVN/code-versioned environment, they quickly become essential. If you know they could help you and have been putting it off, then Walton’s tutorial will take all the pain out of getting up to speed quickly.
After his tutorial, you may also want to check out this Migrations Cheat Sheet by Garrett Snider.
