Maintaining the database schema

A pain point common in nearly every team-based project I've ever worked on is how to manage the database. More often than not, teams decide to have a central development database, and all the developers use that central development database as their backing DB while making changes. This invariably results in somebody breaking somebody else's application under development because the database schema gets changed in some way, or test data gets removed or modified, and so on. Having a single monolithic development database can be real nasty, and is something that I try to avoid.

I'm a firm believer that a developer should be able to check out the source code, and within a few keystrokes, be able to successfully build and run the application. This is difficult, if not impossible, to do without having some kind of automated tool to build a database on the developer's own local machine. Thankfully, some kind souls on the Internet share my ideals and have created...