Treat schema changes as code: branch, review, merge
Practice
The practice
Database decisions made on day one are the hardest to undo on day 365. Make every schema change a branch with a deploy request, select the columns a query needs rather than everything, and add the index the query will actually use.
2026-10-09
The article's before-and-after: an unindexed select-star on a status and date became a column list with a composite index on those two fields, about 2 ms instead of about 8 s at ten million rows.
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