Its crazy to me after all these years that django-like migrations aren't in every language. On the one hand they seem so straightforward and powerful, but there must be some underlying complexities of having it autogenerate migrations.

Its always a surprise when i went to Elixir or Rust and the migration story was more complicated and manual compared to just changing a model, generating a migration and committing.

In the pre-LLM world, I was writing ecto files, and it was super repetitive to define make large database strucutres compared to Django.

Going from Django to Phoenix I prefer manual migrations. Despite being a bit tedious and repetitive, by doing a "double pass" on the schema I often catch bugs, typos, missing indexes, etc. that I would have missed with Django. You waste a bit of time on the simple schemas, but you save a ton of time when you are defining more complex ones. I lost count on how many bugs were introduced because someone was careless with Django migrations, and it is also surprising that some Django devs don't know how to translate the migrations to the SQL equivalent.

At least you can opt-in to automated migrations in Elixir if you use Ash.

There are some subtle edge cases in the django migrations where doing all the migrations at once is not the same as doing migrations one by one. This has bitten me on multiple django projects.

well in elixir you can have two schemas for the same table, which could represent different views, for example, an admin view and a user view. this is not (necessarily) for security but it reduces the number of columns fetched in the query to only what you need for the purpose.

There is no way to autogenerate migrations that work in all cases. There are lots of things out there that can generate migrations that work for most simple cases.