Definition
Database Migration
A version-controlled change to your database schema — adding tables, modifying columns, or transforming data — applied consistently across all environments.
Database migrations are scripts that incrementally modify a database's structure, tracked in version control alongside application code. Tools like Prisma Migrate, Flyway, Alembic, and Knex manage the migration lifecycle — creating, applying, and rolling back schema changes in order. Without migrations, database changes are made ad-hoc through console commands, leading to environments that drift out of sync and deployments that fail because the database doesn't match the code. AI-generated projects often skip migration tooling entirely, leaving founders manually running SQL statements and hoping they remember what changed.
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