You should tell me how you rename database columns in AWS without breaking anything.
I’m not really sure what the point of this article is, it just seems to promote the company’s migration method with a misleading title. But I highly disagree that self-hosted is harder. With many self-hosted BaaS systems I’d argue it’s easier.
On-Prem, the operations team can announce: Hey, System XYZ won't be available Saturday Morning in two weeks due to an upgrade. Then you shutdown the entire thing, change the column name and start it back up on a new version. I've had a few chats with system responsible people at customers even for very large customer support organizations - to them, a well coordinated and controlled downtime is something they can just work around and it might even be preferable over a more complex, less controlled maintenance without downtime.
In our own hosting, the more complex migration procedure would be easier to coordinate and execute though, than coordinating such a downtime with a lot of customers.
It is generally the case that preventative maintenance is orders of magnitude cheaper than break fix maintenance. If you have the luxury of bringing entire systems down routinely, you are much more likely to engage in the first kind.
This method doesn’t work as well with distributed DBs, but to be fair they’re a terrible idea for most use cases.
Intermediate updatable views is one way.
I thought that was a RDBMS primitive.