Migrations and Schema Changes
What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it? Plan schema changes with backups, compatibility, verification, and a recovery path before applying them to production.
What You Will Be Able to Decide
- Explain migrations and schema changes in product and business terms.
- Apply this decision: Plan schema changes with backups, compatibility, verification, and a recovery path before applying them to production.
- Recognise this material risk: a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database.
- Use this review: Use one CRM contact and its related opportunity to test missing values, duplicate records, deletion, and restore.
A founder is deciding how the product should remember information and preserve its meaning over time. This lesson gives you a concrete question to take into a build brief, proposal review, or product decision.
What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it? The course example is A lightweight CRM for a two-person sales team; use it to decide what evidence would justify the choice before a builder implements it.
What Does Migrations and Schema Changes Mean for Your Product?
A founder is deciding how the product should remember information and preserve its meaning over time.
Use the illustrative service for this course (A lightweight CRM for a two-person sales team) to make the choice concrete. What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it?
Technical term
Migrations and Schema Changes
A migration is a controlled, repeatable change to database structure or stored data as the product evolves.
How Should a Founder Use Migrations and Schema Changes?
For a lightweight crm for a two-person sales team, ask what would happen if a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database.
For this decision, the useful standard is that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- Decision: Plan schema changes with backups, compatibility, verification, and a recovery path before applying them to production.
- Evidence to request: show that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- Owner: name who will respond if a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database.
- Record the result in the data model and recovery plan.
- Practical review: Use one CRM contact and its related opportunity to test missing values, duplicate records, deletion, and restore.
How Do You Choose an Approach to Migrations and Schema Changes?
What must remain true about the business record when people edit, archive, export, or restore it? Plan schema changes with backups, compatibility, verification, and a recovery path before applying them to production.
The risk is that a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database. Compare a simpler option with the proposed one, including who will operate either choice.
- Describe the user or business outcome that must be protected.
- Identify the most credible failure and its consequence.
- Compare the simplest adequate approach with one realistic alternative.
- Set a review point for when the decision may need to change.
What Evidence Should You Accept for Migrations and Schema Changes?
What Warning Signs Should You Look For?
- The proposal does not address this risk: a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database.
- Nobody can show whether the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption.
- The decision has no named owner or review point.
What Should You Ask a Consultant?
- What changes for the user if we choose this approach to migrations and schema changes?
- How have we reduced or accepted this risk: a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database.
- Can you demonstrate that the data model can represent the real business rules without ambiguity or silent corruption?
- Who owns the result, and when will we reconsider it?
Key takeaway
Key Takeaway
Plan schema changes with backups, compatibility, verification, and a recovery path before applying them to production. Ask for evidence against the specific risk: a release corrupts data or makes the running application incompatible with its database.