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Rails-style migrations (did they invent them? I have no idea. I currently use Sequel's implementation) allow you to change the schema as often as you want. I often write half a dozen of them over the course of a feature branch. The rest of the team merges them in, and when they boot the app they get a message saying they have migrations to run. It's always been supremely reliable, even after complex merges. It gets more involved when you have multiple interacting DBs, but what doesn't?

You have to write sensible migrations of course, or you can get into trouble. This is a feature.

Obviously wide-ranging schema changes may require you to rewrite a lot of your app code, but I don't see how that's different for a schemaless database.

My bigger worry is that every "schemaless" app still has a schema, just one that isn't well defined, similarly to how an app with a big mess of flags and boolean logic still has a state machine representation, it just isn't codified, or even finite or deterministic for all the developers know.



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