Although the process and tools used to develop software are interrelated, the world of database development has not always been influenced as heavily by modern IDEs, agile processes and build tools as, say, Java, .NET and Ruby. At times, this has led to a mismatch between the processes and tools used by two team members in a single software project, or even a single team member filling two roles.
In recent years, there has been a fair amount of discussion about how this mismatch can be reduced. In particular, Scott Ambler and Pramod Sadalage's Refactoring Databases have popularized the idea of developing databases through a series of fine-grained, trackable changes with automatic migration, sometimes called 'database refactoring'.
If you're not using ActiveRecord in Ruby on Rails, and particularly if you're using Java, LiquiBase (once known as the Sundog Database Refactoring Tool) is an interesting candidate: an open-source tool for database refactoring and migration.
LiquiBase can perform database migrations as part of a build with Ant support and a nascent Maven plugin, or as part of your deployment process, using a Servlet listener (http://www.liquibase.org/manual/latest/servletlistenermigrator.html). Alternately, it can be invoked directly from the command-line. LiquiBase has good documentation and a quick-start guide to help you get up and running quickly. It should be compatible with any JDBC database, although testing has focused on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
LiquiBase has a recent release and future plans that include a Database Refactoring IDE plugin, support for stored procedures and views, test data generation and more.