Question

I recently began digging into the South documentation and discovered that it had two distinct types of migrations:

• schemamigration
• datamigration

As a result of my ignorance, I’ve always used schemamigrations for everything. In other words, even if I had something that was truly a “data migration”, I’d simply used South’s schemamigration to convert the data (with no apparent consequences).

As I read the documentation, I’m not seeing a fault in this approach. Does anyone know the fundamental difference between the two migrations and what I may be missing by sticking with schemamigrations?

Answer 1

Per the lead developer of South:

You can see the difference here:
https://bitbucket.org/andrewgodwin/south/src/b3ed126b19a2/south/v2.py

As that shows, the only difference is that data migrations aren’t
dry-run if you have a database that requires it (MySQL). Otherwise,
there’s little difference, at least at the moment – the management
commands differ, though (it’s all about user interface separation,
essentially).