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Developer Expectations
Developers expect autonomy, fast feedback loops, and transparent migrations when working with schema evolution. They don't want dependencies on infrastructure or data engineering teams, prefer not having an SQL-first approach, and expect local-first development with CI/CD. The right developer experience is having a transparent way to run migrations, ideally with AI assistance for selecting data types, sorting keys, and partition keys.
What Developers Expect
Autonomy
Developers want to make schema changes themselves without dependencies on infrastructure or data engineering teams. The reality in ClickHouse is that schema evolution is hard: full rewrites take hours or days at scale, sorting keys and partition keys are immutable decisions, one change breaks everything downstream (queries, dashboards, materialized views, app code), and rewrites compete with live queries for production resources.
Fast Feedback Loops
Developers expect fast feedback loops with local-first development, CI/CD integration, quick iterations, and immediate validation. The reality is that schema changes often require production testing, complex backfilling takes time, and it's difficult to test locally.
Developer expectation: