DB Migration vs. Exporting/Importing SQL backups

Yii 2.0 General Discussions
1

I’m not sure why one would prefer using Yii’s migrate tool to keep track of db changes instead

of simply exporting .sql files as backups. Especially since the migrate tool doesn’t automatically

keep track of the changes (you have to program it to, by writing code in the up() and down() functions).

Why bother to do all that when exporting/importing backups would be faster?

2

Seems to me it would be a lot faster and easier to use migrations to get the changes to structure in a multi-programmer environment. For a single developer it might be overkill.

edit

I take that back, partially. It is a lot more robust and faster to migrate up() than to execute a bunch of .sql statements on a live production server!