In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog today Wern Ancheta introduces you to a tool that can help with database versioning, DBV. DBV is a tool developed by Victor Stanciu and made available on GitHub.

It’s good practice to always use a version control system in any of your projects. Be it a side-project in which you are the only developer, or a team project where five or more people are working on it together. But the idea of putting your database into version control isn’t really that widespread. Often times we take the database for granted. But like the source files in our project, the database is constantly changing too. That’s why we also need a way to track the changes that we have made and easily share it to other members of our team. In this article we will take a look at DBV, a database version control system written in PHP for MySQL databases so you need to have PHP and MySQL installed before you can use it, along with a web server like Apache or Nginx.

He steps you through the installation (via an installer and configuration through the "config.php" setup file. The system keeps track of lots of different changes including new tables, updated field descriptions, additional views, stored procedures and functions. He includes some screenshots of the UI and goes through the workflow of adding new tasks and syncing with a remote database server.