The beauty is that if something goes wrong, the rollback script gets us out of trouble.
ah, would it be that were true. Suppose you need to roll back until after the next install? I defy you to set up a reliable test plan that will handle the usual series of casual database tweaking popular with modern devs. The time spent developing and assuring the quality of the rollback will be mostly wasted energy when you're faced with rolling back a change which the next N changes are dependent on.
(more) seriously any sane scheme like yours seems to run into trouble when people want to add columns to some base table. Thusly I think "Alter Table" should be a banned operation for devs in any live system. But it's great job security for a DBA (speaking as a DBA, btw).
ah, would it be that were true. Suppose you need to roll back until after the next install? I defy you to set up a reliable test plan that will handle the usual series of casual database tweaking popular with modern devs. The time spent developing and assuring the quality of the rollback will be mostly wasted energy when you're faced with rolling back a change which the next N changes are dependent on.
(more) seriously any sane scheme like yours seems to run into trouble when people want to add columns to some base table. Thusly I think "Alter Table" should be a banned operation for devs in any live system. But it's great job security for a DBA (speaking as a DBA, btw).