Yeah, sqlite is kind of ridiculous in this way where you actually cannot add a column with a required field onto a table that already exists. http://stackoverflow.com/a/6710280

The particular issue that the comment references doesn't require a DB reset though -- you might be encountering an issue where you can't modify the schema of your database to add required fields when you have preexisting records (which won't have the field). Writing your feature such that for deployment we need a full reset of the database is fine. We don't have a production system that already has user data which needs to be maintained, so when we are done with this phase, we will be blowing away the database and reconstructing it from scratch anyway.