Continuing in the series of big problems that are mostly solved, we have database migrations. A couple days ago I talked about Search.

Database Migrations are an interesting piece of the Django community. Rails has the functionality built in, but Django currently relies on third party apps for this functionality. One of the core philosophies about not including apps in the Django core is that ideas percolate better in the fast release environment outside of the core. When something goes into core, it is automatically seen as blessed, and will certainly become the defacto answer to a problem. Leaving things outside allows multiple different implementations to develop (as they did), and for one to become the standard (which it has). Along the way it has picked up ideas from others, and now provides a good answer to migrations.

South has emerged as the obvious choice for database migrations in the Django community. We use it in production at work at the Journal World, and it has served us well.

I have talked about south in the past, using