On his blog today Sameer Borate has a new post looking at using Doctrine DBAL to make schemas rather than having to make them by hand each time (can be very useful for reloads with fixtures).

A tedious task during web development is that of database schema creation. A schema containing a few tables comprising of a small set of rows is quick, while that containing dozens of tables and large numbers of columns is a tedious process. I usually resort to a small php script with some regular expression tossed in to automatically create a schema from a text file definition. But that is a little buggy as I’ve to manually add the indexes and other small things. Now that Doctrine has released a DBAL library, this will provide a nice ability to automatically create sql schemas.

He introduces the DBAL abstraction layer and includes a basic script to create a schema for a MySQL database, manually adding the columns and setting up things like primary keys and foreign key constraints. He also includes the SQL statements that it will generate and execute on your Doctrine-based connection.