[gmassman]

Alembic is certainly a bit of a challenge to grasp at first, especially if you want to do anything more complicated than create or alter tables. However, it does provide a great amount of flexibility if you want to implement more complex migration functionality. It allows library developers to add powerful features that would be very difficult to do with Rails/ActiveRecord or Django ORM. FWIW I maintain the flask-audit-logger package. It allows users to maintain audit logs of specific tables using postgres triggers. Being able to create custom migration operations is really an amazing feat. The alembic docs are quite dense, but the code is well organized and very readable.