tbls VS dbmate

Autogenerated database documentation is often pretty hit and miss but tbls[1] does a pretty good job in that space. Especially when you comment on your tables, fields, views, functions etc (which is a good habit anyway!) the output is quite useful

[1] https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls

In-database comments combined with something like https://github.com/k1LoW/tbls make for very cheap database documentation.

No affiliation with tbls except that I'm a big fan

Check out tbls. You can create a ERD in one command

A regular code repo with the scripts (with pull/merge requests for review) and then a CI job that builds containers with something like dbmate https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate that can then be run against any staging/prod environment.

As we want to maintain the track of our changes to the DB, we are going to use migrations. In this case, we are going to use dbmate. But, you can use any other tool you want.

> For example having database migrations built in etc.

I actually went the exact opposite route, at least when possible: https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate

Pure SQL migrations, regardless of the back end technology that you use, completely decoupled from how each framework/library views things and therefore not dependent on them (you could even rewrite the back end in another technology later on, if needed; or swap ORMs; or avoid issues when there's a major ORM version update).

It's really nice when you can generate entity mappings based on a live database, like with https://blog.jetbrains.com/dotnet/2022/01/31/entity-framewor...

So in my case, I can have:

  * a DB that has migrations applied with dbmate, completely decoupled from any back end(s) that might use it

You can run dbmate as part of your CI/CD pipeline. You just keep a dbmate directory in your repo and deploy migrations with your code.

In general with ORMs, you will face a problem in one way or another. I ended up simply using https://github.com/gajus/slonik and https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate for migrations. My life is way much better since then.

I like dbmate, super simple and straightforward to use. For your specific use case, it can also be configured using your .env!

Would always go for a language agnostic migration tool, e.g. https://github.com/amacneil/dbmate to stay flexible and stay away from lock-in effects (besides sql).