librarian VS Phinx

2: Check get_structure() in https://gitlab.com/hsleisink/librarian/-/blob/master/libraries/directory.php.

You should look into migrations and seed data. https://phinx.org/ is what I use with no issues.

I've had success with Phinx, That aside, for many databases, you can throw adminer in there and create SQL exports of the tables, triggers, procedures, etc, and use it as controlled migrations repo.

If you want to version control your db schema, you could look at a database migration system like phinx. Php frameworks like Laravel do this and it works very nicely.

I think that for Notion (neat company btw) it might make a lot of sense to keep the schema pretty loose but I have managed to keep an agile DB alive and well with a lot of flexibility. A lot of migration infrastructure packages and tools will store the migration state in the DB itself - we're using Phinx[1] internally which creates a `phinxlog` table with a record of migrations that have been run - there is tooling to migrate only up to a specific version and since the record of all executed versions is stored in the DB the tool can easily figure out what works needs to be done in which circumstances. The result is that we can easily roll different environments onto different versions.

Neither schema driven nor unstructured is always the right call - they both have their strengths and weaknesses - but I think that trust in data integrity is pretty important when writing flexible code on top of a data layer. Knowing that expected keys can't be omitted and that so-and-so column must conform to a given data domain can really alleviate defensive coding costs.

If you'd like to talk some more I can shoot you an email and we can sit down sometime?

1. https://phinx.org/

- For more granular on db migration between development and production, I use Phinx (https://phinx.org/). So, development team has no need to touch the GUI via wp dashboard to make any changes. This tool is similar to laravel eloquent, or ruby on rails' active record.

We use https://phinx.org/ for db migrations, if that helps in any way. So now I try to solve this and other problems.

I would also opt for an explicit build call. Also, if you decide it is not worth writing, you could try Phinx (https://phinx.org/), which does migrations very similar to Laravel's. That way you don't have to re-invent the wheel.