zlacker

For schema changes, it absolutely can, for every situation except table renames or column renames.

That might sound like a major caveat, but many companies either ban renames or have a special "out-of-band" process for them anyway, once a table is being used in production. This is necessary because renames have substantial deploy-order complexity, i.e. you cannot make the schema change at the same exact instant as the corresponding application change, and the vast majority of ORMs don't provide anything to make this sane.

In any case, many thousands of companies use declarative schema management. Some of the largest companies on earth use it. It is known to work, and when engineered properly, it definitely improves development velocity.

>>evanel+(OP)
Uh, any database of sufficient size is going to do migrations “out of band” as they can take hours or days and you never have code requiring those changes ship at migration start.

Small things where you don’t have DBA or whatever, sure use tooling like you would for auto-changes in a local development.

>>srouss+r6
Very large tech companies completely automate the schema change process (at least for all common operations) so that development teams can make schema changes at scale without direct DBA involvement. The more sophisticated companies handle this regardless of table size, sharding, operational events, etc. It makes a massive difference in execution speed for the entire company.

Renames aren't compatible with that automation flow though, which is what I meant by "out-of-band". They rely on careful orchestration alongside code change deploys, which gets especially nasty when you have thousands of application servers and thousands of database shards. In some DBMS, companies automate them using a careful dance of view-swapping, but that seems brittle performance-wise / operationally.