At my company we have several developers all working on projects internally, each with their own virtualbox setup. We use SVN to handle the source, but occasionally run into issues where a database (MySQL) schema change is necessary, and this has to be propagated to all of the other developers. At the moment we have a manually-written log file which lists what you changed, and the SQL needed to perform the change.
I’m hoping there might be a better solution — ideally one linked to SVN, e.g. if you update to revision 893 the system knows this requires database revision 183 and updates your local schema automagically. We’re not concerned with the data being synched, just the schema.
Of course one solution would be to have all developers running off a single, central database; this however has the disadvantage that a schema change could break everyone else’s build until they do an svn up.
One option is a data dictionary in YAML/JSON. There is a nice article here