Can’t you do this concurrently these days? Also, managing scheme in the database was the least of my issues when deleting/adding fields. You still need to make sure your clients are resilient against null or missing fields in the responses, and your scheduled jobs don’t query the data which isn’t there anymore. Point is, not having to alter the db scheme doesn’t make such a big difference. You still need to make sure your system overall is build in way that allows smooth data migrations.