Usually I'm the odd one out. It's comforting to know that I have been taking the reasonable course the whole time. The database is the foundation and the application has to live on top of it.

The application is bothered by extra columns? As an application guy I can't quite see why that would happen with a database. With flat files or something like that I can see how something like that could be a problem.

Once I was caught by the SELECT * and then take the (x) column by number. Database changes at one client had been deployed in a different order and so new columns were not in the same order as other clients even at the same deployment level.

Deploying the database changes ahead of the application changes just makes good sense. The exceptions to this would be when data is moved. The change to the database then breaks the old application version.