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Having to upgrade a database schema makes installing a new release of software a lot trickier. What are the best practices for doing this?
I'm looking for a checklist or timeline of action items, such as
- 8:30 shut down apps
- 8:45 modify schema
- 9:15 install new apps
- 9:30 restart db
etc, showing how to minimize risk and downtime. Issues such as
- backing out of the upgrade if things go awry
- minimizing impact to existing apps
- "hot" updates while the database is running
- promoting from dev to test to production servers
are especially of interest.