Last week, I had to back out a (quite big) patch from the to-be-published addons.mozilla.org trunk because while it worked on our developer instances, it behaved totally strange on the staging environment: When I saved a record using the newly added UI, the changes partly didn't show up in the database.
So we went ahead and delayed the release of the patch until we figured out what the problem was.
After a little digging around the internet today I found a hint suggesting to flush CakePHP's cached models/table descriptions from the app/tmp/cache/models directory every time a database change is applied -- which fixed the problem we encountered.
So, fellow CakePHP users, keep that in mind next time you alter your DB, and your life will be happier :).