Making your SQL Server database changes backward compatible: Adding a new column
As multi-tier architectures grow over time, it is often challenging to coordinate those changes across the data, logic and presentation tiers. Unless planned and implemented carefully, an act as simple as adding a column to a table can grind all of the components of your application to a halt. While some of us have comfortable 12-hour maintenance windows every weekend, many of us are bound by service level agreements that are much more strict. So we must find ways to introduce fixes and new features with zero downtime, and without requiring every single component to be refactored at the same time.
2010-06-23
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