What is the best way to make significant DB changes to an existing symfony project?

I have a large live database. What are the best practices for making schema (doctrine) changes?

When doing development I can just build-all and reload some fixtures and that is usually fine if my data structure changes I can manually adjust the fixtures so they reload correctly. How do I do this w开发者_Python百科ith a large live database with thousands of records?

If I simply pull my changes to my prod server and data dump the rebuild and reload it is likely that the schema changes will prevent the data from reloading (especially if I have removed a column). Is there some standard way of handling this sort of thing?

I also find that table row ordering is not always preserved when reloading this way.

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Look into doctrine migrations, this is what they are made for. Can't help you with specifics, I'm a propel guy.

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Although Doctrine Migrations can be used, its still in alpha state and should be used with caution.

A more stable solution probably would be making the changes to database schema manually if you know about some database stuff IMO.

Doctrine Migrations: http://www.doctrine-project.org/projects/migrations