[merth]

I didnt read the article but how you do is, you should create new column without deleting the old one, and your code should be updated to use the new column, once you phase out the old version of the code, you backfill data from old column to new one, and delete the old column.

[sgarland]

Or you rewrite queries on the fly with ProxySQL or similar to use the new column name, and then deploy the new code. Can even insert a momentary pause at the proxy layer so no queries hitting the old name sneak through while you do the rename.

This method doesn’t work as well with distributed DBs, but to be fair they’re a terrible idea for most use cases.