I’m working on a fairly mature database and writing a new Elixir app to sit on top of it. The problem is getting the migrations started. The structure.sql is a great starting point, but we’d like to have it be part of the migrations.

I tried to do something similar once before on a much smaller database and I remember eventually giving up and re-creating the database with regular Ecto migrations. But with this big/mature database, re-creating everything would be really time intensive. IIRC, one of the problems is that each Postgres “schema” (something analogous to a “folder” or partition) has to be created in its own transaction, so if we have a dozen separate schemas, we would need at least that many migrations (because each migration happens in its own transaction). It’s not the end of the world to use mix ecto.load (e.g. done as part of an alias), but a standard migration would be preferred.

Any thoughts on this? Is this maybe more difficult than it’s worth? Thanks for any pointers!