I've arrived at the point where I realise that I must start versioning my database schemata and changes. I consequently read the existing posts on SO about that topic but I'm not sure how to proceed.
I'm basically a one man company and not long ago I didn't even use version control for my code. I'm on a windows environment, using Aptana (IDE) and SVN (with Tortoise). I work on PHP/mysql projects.
What's a efficient and sufficient (no overkill) way to version my database schemata?
I do have a freelancer or two in some projects but I don't expect a lot of branching and merging going on. So basically I would like to keep track of concurrent schemata to my code revisions.
[edit] Momentary solution: for the moment I decided I will just make a schema dump plus one with the necessary initial data whenever I'm going to commit a tag (stable version). That seems to be just enough for me at the current stage.[/edit]
[edit2]plus I'm now also using a third file called increments.sql where I put all the changes with dates, etc. to make it easy to trace the change history in one file. from time to time I integrate the changes into the two other files and empty the increments.sql[/edit]
I think this question deserves a modern answer so I'm going to give it myself. When I wrote the question in 2009 I don't think Phinx already existed and most definitely Laravel didn't.
Today, the answer to this question is very clear: Write incremental DB migration scripts, each with an up and a down method and run all these scripts or a delta of them when installing or updating your app. And obviously add the migration scripts to your VCS.
As mentioned in the beginning, there are excellent tools today in the PHP world which help you manage your migrations easily. Laravel has DB migrations built-in including the respective shell commands. Everyone else has a similarly powerful framework agnostic solution with Phinx.
Both Artisan migrations (Laravel) and Phinx work the same. For every change in the DB, create a new migration, use plain SQL or the built-in query builder to write the up and down methods and run artisan migrate resp. phinx migrate in the console.