On Django Migrations: South vs Nashvegas

If you're writing your models with Django and not using migrations, that's crazy.

South and Nashvegas are two options for managing your migrations (really the only two I've ever heard of in practice). I use both, almost daily.

Nashvegas, is far and away the newer and lesser used. It doesn't do backwards migrations at all, and migrations are DB specific (although, much SQL is close enough that you can still use many migrations on other databases). That being said, it does one thing really well that south doesn't touch: your whole project.

South is app-centric, not project-centric. Much care has been made to make sure that you can start using south on your app part-way through development, where Nashvegas should really be used from the start. Converting to Nashvegas with a team requires though and planning, and with South, it requires one management command from each person (per app).

My "Daily Driver" is South, but it will be interesting to see if and where NashVegas gains momentum.

16th March 2011