Great arcticle, Solomon!

I used to do this with humongus mainframe databases for banks back in the 90s. And yes, you really can implement the change in seconds if you're well prepared. Real 24/7 operations.

It amazes me how many 'architects' still don't get this sort of technique and 'polute' databases with silly tables/views as they try to work around the fact that even a 60 second outage is unacceptable.

BTW - I've used very similar techniques to migrate huge amounts of data from an old system to a new system. Triggers are very cool. 😉