You still need a system for tracking which changes have been applied to
your database and for distributing the changes to the rest of your team.
Even if you don't use South's automatic migration generation, its
database-independent schema modification api [1], dependency tracking,
and tracking of which migrations have been run, are useful and
necessary. In fact, the automatic generation of migrations is an
optional feature of South that was not in it when first released.
When you need to write SQL and interact with your database directly, using
`db.execute` inside a South migration is a nice way to do it.
Even if you don't use South's automatic migration generation, its database-independent schema modification api [1], dependency tracking, and tracking of which migrations have been run, are useful and necessary. In fact, the automatic generation of migrations is an optional feature of South that was not in it when first released.
When you need to write SQL and interact with your database directly, using `db.execute` inside a South migration is a nice way to do it.
[1]: http://south.readthedocs.org/en/latest/databaseapi.html