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I don't really get this. ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN X is a cheap operation when your database is small, at least on decent hardware. It's when you get up to scale that it starts being a burden. During the rapidly-evolving stage is when it should be the easiest to alter database schemas, because you shouldn't have accumulated all that much data yet.

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I work at a company with multi-gigabyte tables and ALTER TABLE is still easy to pull off, we just use tools the community has built for larger tables. It's one of the most unfounded fears I've heard in the industry.

And... if you accumulate a lot of data,you may mostly access it in an aggregated way, such as GROUP BY. where ALTER TABLE ADD COLUMN X is free.

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