I have a web application using sqlalchemy (within Pylons). I need to effiently change the schema to be able to change the production version at least on a daily basis, maybe more, without losing the data.

I have played a little bit with sqlalchemy-migrate over the week-end and I would say that it gave me a bad impression. First **I think it cannot help with migration between two databases engines**; that's something that could probably be done with sqlalchemy alone. 
Second the docs do not seem up to date. I had to change some command-line options, like giving the repository path at each command, this could be a bug of migrate. 

But the worst thing it the "manage.py **test**" command. Not only it actually **modifies the database** (this point is clearly indicated in the documentation so I can't blame migrate) but my first migration script just made plain stupid schema migration, leaving the upgraded-downgraded db with a **different schema than the original**. But the "manage.py test" just answered something like

```
 success !

```

That is, it did not even check if the schema was left in a coherent state. 
So **is it worth using migrate?** Is there any advantage compared to the Do It Yourself method associated with good practices [as proposed by S.Lott](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4165452/how-to-efficiently-manage-frequent-schema-changes-using-sqlalchemy/4165496#4165496) ?
Are there alternatives to sqlalchemy-migrate actually simplifying the migration process or am I just trying to use migrate with a bad a *priori* (then please show me why is't clearly superior to creating CSV columns as proposed in the link above)?

Many Thanks!