I find the <i>premise</i> of this article (that a small maintenance outage is never acceptable) to be unreasonable for the vast majority of applications developed by the vast majority of developers.<p>If, as claimed, when using a RDBMS:<p>> your database will make the change almost immediately without having to update any rows<p>The amount of downtime required to deploy a change which renames the column and changes the code which accesses said column, is marginally more than "almost immediately".