It&#x27;s always possible to make changes to your schema without needing to potentially roll back the database. It may just be more annoying than you are willing to attempt. You might need to roll back your code to a previous version, but if you structure your changes right, you&#x27;ll do it in multiple steps. (These are basically what&#x27;s laid out in the article, but broken down more.)<p><pre><code>  1. Change your code to write to old and new schema; keep reading from old schema. 
  2. Migrate data to new schema in background. 
  3. Add a flag to control where you&#x27;re reading from. Default it to read from old location. Keep writing to both. 
  4. Flip the flag on some subset of your jobs. Ensure everything is still running smoothly for as long as you like. 
  5. Change the default to read from new schema. Wait as long as you like to be comfortable that the change is working properly. 
  6. Delete the code that reads from the old schema. 
  7. Delete the code that writes to the old schema. 
  8. Drop the data in the old schema.
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At any point prior to deleting the old data, if you encounter problems you can roll back to an old version of the code. If your schema changes are incompatible, you can make an entire new database with the new schema. This may temporarily waste some storage space, but it&#x27;s very safe.