Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS
18 hours ago
“Reliable migrations” almost seems like an oxymoron. Migrations are complicated, difficult and error prone. I think there’s a good takeaway here around good initial schema design practices. The less you have to morph your schema overtime, the less of those risky migrations need to run.
My experience over the last decade has been different.
Use a popular framework. Run it against your test database. Always keep backups in case something unforseen happens.
Something especially trivial like adding additional columns is a solved problem.
My experience has not been so smooth. Migrations are reasonable, but they're not free and "always keeps backups" sounds like you'd tolerate downtime more than I would.
Even in the best case (e.g. basic column addition), the migration itself can be "noisy neighbors" for other queries. It can cause pressure on downstream systems consuming CDC (and maybe some of those run queries too, and now your load is even higher).