> And what is the plus side of having a code-first DB really? You can fairly easily store those “alter table” changes as you go along and have full availability of history in a very readable way that anyone, including people not using C#, Java, Python.
The benefits should be obvious if you've used ORMs. They are an object that represents your database data in code rather than in a table where you can't touch it. If you have code that brings data from a database into code, congratulations, you've implemented part of an ORM. Having the data model defined "in code" treats the code as first-class instead of the SQL, which makes sense from an ergonomics perspective, you will spend much more time with the code objects than you will the SQL schemas. Either way, you will have two versions: a SQL version and a code version. You might as well get both from writing one.
If you can read alter table in SQL, you can probably read migrations.AddField in Python, and whatever the equivalent is in the other languages. I still am waiting with bated breath for the problems with much maligned (by some) ORMs to arrive.
The only area of development where ORMs haven’t been the cause for at least some trouble in my career has been with relatively small and completely decoupled services. Even here I’ve had to replace countless ORMs with more efficient approaches as the service eventually needed to be build with C/C++. That being said, I don’t think any of these should have been build without the ORM. The rewrite would have been almost as much of a hassle if there hadn’t been an ORM after all.
I’m not really against ORMs as such. I’m not a fan of code-first databases for anything serious, but as far as CRUD operations goes I don’t see why you wouldn’t use an ORM until it fails you, which it won’t in most cases, and in those cases where it does… well similar to what I said earlier you just wouldn’t have build it to scale from the beginning anyway, and if you had and it turned out it didn’t need to scale then you probably wasted a lot of developer resources to do so.
The benefits should be obvious if you've used ORMs. They are an object that represents your database data in code rather than in a table where you can't touch it. If you have code that brings data from a database into code, congratulations, you've implemented part of an ORM. Having the data model defined "in code" treats the code as first-class instead of the SQL, which makes sense from an ergonomics perspective, you will spend much more time with the code objects than you will the SQL schemas. Either way, you will have two versions: a SQL version and a code version. You might as well get both from writing one.
If you can read alter table in SQL, you can probably read migrations.AddField in Python, and whatever the equivalent is in the other languages. I still am waiting with bated breath for the problems with much maligned (by some) ORMs to arrive.