I am looking for an organised way to run joomla updates locally and then update production systems by means of code deployment + db migrations, so that i do not have to update joomla on production, or disable the site while running updates.

The current update component uses a specific function apparently to run some sort of sql updates

https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/staging/administrator/components/com_joomlaupdate/models/default.php#L515

In finaliseUpgrade it looks like it is fetching/parsing some queries and applying them to the schema. If i understand this correctly it loops through the scripts/place holders in com_admin/sql/{DBType}/*.sql detecting all the new versions of sql files it has to run on the db.

The problem with these scripts is that I do not see how i can use them as a migration tool for my production database as they are table prefixed and also I would much rather have a single consolidated migration script.

Could you suggest if joomla actually writes the changes it performed somewhere in a migration file?

The logs/joomla_update.php file contains some traces of the changes but these are truncated as apparently it records only a few characters

Any suggestion is very much appreciated.