[abhorrence]

Sure you do! It's how online schema changes tend to be done, e.g. https://docs.percona.com/percona-toolkit/pt-online-schema-ch... describes doing an atomic rename as the last step.

[yen223]

You aren't renaming tables at scale because there are 27 downstream services that will break if you even think about fixing the name of the revnue_dolars table, and it's not in anyone's OKR to fix it

[paulryanrogers]

Take a closer look at how some min downtime tools work. They often use a drop-swap strategy to replace an old table name with a new one that has schema changes.

There are sometimes temporary views to keep the old and new code working during gradual transitions.

[sroussey]

I’m not sure if this is a joke (ref to OKR was funny, for example), or just naive and not understanding the parent comment. I found it funny either way though.