Do you know of any application that synchronizes two databases - sometimes during development it is necessary to add a table row or two or a new table or column. Typically I write each sql statement to some file and execute the lines on my production database during the upload path (backing it up before). I use mySQL and postreSQL databases.
What is your practice and what apps can help you.
You asked for tool or application answers, but what you really want are process answers. The basic theme here is that you should version your database DDL (and DML, if needed) and provide change scripts to be able to update any version of the database to a higher version.
This set of links provided by Jeff Atwood, written by K. Scott Allen, explains in detail what it should look like - they do a better job than I can write here: http://www.codinghorror. com/blog/2008/02/get- your-database-under-version-control.html