Rob Allen has a new post to his blog today that looks at database migrations in Zend Framework applications. He introduces a component of his own - Akrabat_Db_Schema_Manager - to handle the migrations.

It is intended that any time you want to make a change to your database schema (add columns, tables, indexes, etc), then you create a new migration file. [...] The migration file contains a class that extends Akrabat_Db_Schema_AbstractChange and must contain two methods: up() and down(). It follows that up() is called when implementing the changes in this migration and down() is called to put the database back where it was if the change is backed out.

He includes an example of a migration file, one that defines the "up" method to create a table and the "down" to remove it. The Akrabat_Db_Schema_Manager is what your script would interface with by calling the "updateTo" method and change your database's structure. It can even hook into Zend_Tool to make it command-line friendly.