Frequent, safe database schema changes in production

Schlomi Noach, a high-profile MySQL tools & concepts guru has abstracted and summarized useful principles for assuring safe changes to database schemas in a rapidly changing environment.  Changes should be:

• Non-blocking
• Lightweight
• Asynchronous
• Scheduled
• Interruptible
• Trackable
• Failure agnostic
• Revertible
• Redeployable

Each of these checklist items is testable in a non-production environment.