An In-Depth Look At Database Migrations & Seeding By Sammy Powers

In a typical web project, specifications often change over time and a lot of the changes impact the existing database structure.

Doing manual SQL dumps for database structure changes is both tedious and error-prone; plus you don't get all the advantages of version control. Laravel makes database structure changes less of a headache with the migrator tool. On top of that, Laravel also provides tools that make it a breeze to seed your database with dummy data.

In this talk you'll see the contrast of manually making database structure changes verses the Laravel database migrator. We'll also dive into seeding the database with fake data using the database seeder tool and model factories.

For this month's meetup, we welcome back Sammy Powers to speak on this topic. Sammy contributes to various open-source projects, like Facebook PHP SDK (https://github.com/facebook/facebook-php-sdk-v4). he is also the host of PHP Round Table (https://www.phproundtable.com/) and organizer of Chicago PHP User Group (https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-PHP-User-Group/). Follow him @SammyK (https://twitter.com/SammyK).