One of the pain points I tackled around this time was managing schema migrations safely across environments. As systems scaled, manual SQL scripts became brittle and error-prone.
We evaluated tools like Flyway and Liquibase, eventually integrating a migration layer into our build pipelines. This allowed us to:
- Keep schema changes versioned alongside code
- Run validations in pre-deploy steps
- Roll back more predictably
Key design choice: treat schema migrations like code deploys—test them, track them, and fail fast. This reduced production issues significantly.