sqldef is really cool for supporting many database dialects. I'm the author of Skeema [1] which includes a lot of functionality that sqldef lacks, but at the cost of being 100% MySQL/MariaDB-specific. Some other DB-specific options in this space include Stripe's pg-schema-diff [2], results [3], stb-tester's migrator for sqlite [4], among many others over the years.

The more comprehensive solutions from ByteBase, Atlas, Liquibase, etc tend to support multiple databases and multiple paradigms.

And then over in Typescript ORM world, the migrators in Prisma and Drizzle support a "db push" declarative concept. (fwiw, I originated that paradigm; Prisma directly copied several aspects of `skeema push`, and then Drizzle copied Prisma. But ironically, if I ever complete my early-stage next-gen tool, it uses a different deployment paradigm.)

[1] https://github.com/skeema/skeema/

[2] https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff

[3] https://github.com/djrobstep/results

[4] https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...

In the big picture, declarative schema management has lots of advantages around avoiding/solving schema drift, either between environments (staging vs prod) or between shards in a sharded setup (among thousands of shards, one had a master failure at an inopportune time).

It's also much more readable to have the "end state" in your repo at all times, rather than a sequence of ALTERs.

There are a bunch of other advantages; I have an old post about this topic here: https://www.skeema.io/blog/2019/01/18/declarative/

It's also quite essential when maintaining nontrivial stored procedures. Doing that with imperative migrations is a gateway to hell. https://www.skeema.io/blog/2023/10/24/stored-proc-deployment...