We just shipped Atlas v1.1 - The focus of this release is Database Security as Code and Declarative Data Management.
You can now declare database users, roles, permissions, and managed seed data as code - versioned, reviewed, and applied via CI/CD like schema changes.
Ariel from Atlas here. This setup is pretty common (declarative locally, versioned in real environments). Since migrations are auto-generated (by Atlas) on PRs, most developers never touch the versioned workflow directly.
Good point regarding ORMs - that was one of the main problems I wanted to tackle when we built Atlas (https://atlasgo.io). We added support for reading ORM definitions directly, then let you extend the "base schema" defined in them. For example, you can define your models in SQLAlchemy, EF Core, Ent, or others as a partial schema, and then extend it with functions, views, and additional objects.
From there, Atlas handles diffing, planning, and execution. This is similar to importing modules in TF, but for database schemas in Atlas. See this example: https://atlasgo.io/guides/orms/sqlalchemy
You can now declare database users, roles, permissions, and managed seed data as code - versioned, reviewed, and applied via CI/CD like schema changes.
Feel free to share any thoughts or feedback.