zlacker

Uh, any database of sufficient size is going to do migrations “out of band” as they can take hours or days and you never have code requiring those changes ship at migration start.

Small things where you don’t have DBA or whatever, sure use tooling like you would for auto-changes in a local development.

>>srouss+(OP)
Very large tech companies completely automate the schema change process (at least for all common operations) so that development teams can make schema changes at scale without direct DBA involvement. The more sophisticated companies handle this regardless of table size, sharding, operational events, etc. It makes a massive difference in execution speed for the entire company.

Renames aren't compatible with that automation flow though, which is what I meant by "out-of-band". They rely on careful orchestration alongside code change deploys, which gets especially nasty when you have thousands of application servers and thousands of database shards. In some DBMS, companies automate them using a careful dance of view-swapping, but that seems brittle performance-wise / operationally.