Currently, because is not easily upgradable/downgradable. For example, we don't have an easy way to change and rollback schema changes. Perhaps something like sqlalchemy-migrate could be used for this.
At this stage alembic is probably the project we want to use for this (rather than sqlalchemy-migrate): https://bitbucket.org/zzzeek/alembic
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/3212/
I also wrote an automated test for the migration process: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/3376 and back-populated the migrations to 0.12: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/3380 plus fixed a few random bugs in the existing migrations that shook out from the tests.
... and one more, to eliminate the manual stamping step on first upgrade. beaker-init will guess the right version by checking for certain tables/columns. http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/3383
(In reply to Dan Callaghan from comment #5) > ... and one more, to eliminate the manual stamping step on first upgrade. > beaker-init will guess the right version by checking for certain > tables/columns. > > http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/3383 I discovered a problem with this patch, it doesn't correctly stamp the db after guessing the version. http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/3399
Beaker 19.0 has been released.