If your column name is a common keyword, variable name, etc. in your code base and it's difficult to find using project search, that's unfortunate, but we organize our backend code and tests in a logical enough way that it's never taken longer than an hour to create a PR to create a migration to rename a column and update all places in code that reference it.
Renaming a column is an operation which showcases the weakness in not using an ORM. Other operations of the sort do exist, anything that operates on columns across multiple arbitrary spots in the code.
IMO an hour for a change you have so little confidence about is not acceptable when the alternative allows you to do it in a second with full confidence.
While this is fair and I don't disagree that changing a column name or possibly other schema changes using an ORM and it's subsequent migration scripts is potentially going to be a faster exercise than without one, changing a column name (or any schema change for that matter) in a database in my experience is rare. If you choose to use an ORM for reasons like it might (emphasis on might) be a bit faster and easier to change a column name than without one instead of for other more meaningful people or efficiency-oriented reasons of the day-to-day developer workflow is probably a poor approach.
Keep in mind I've installed and used an ORM in projects where the ORM is used only for migrations, but not used in application code and this is absolutely a fine reason to use one imo. But adopting an ORM for migration purposes and forcing or using in application code simply because it's installed isn't necessarily a good approach.
ORMs are to SQL what static types are to programming languages. The conversation we just had was me giving you one example of the benefit of static types, which happens to showcase a huge weakness in dynamic typing:
- How painful is it to rename a class attribute?
=> It's a long search & replace exercise which results in a less-than-certain outcome.
The obvious take from this isn't that "renaming class attributes is rare".
2. project search and replace on $COLUMN_NAME
If your column name is a common keyword, variable name, etc. in your code base and it's difficult to find using project search, that's unfortunate, but we organize our backend code and tests in a logical enough way that it's never taken longer than an hour to create a PR to create a migration to rename a column and update all places in code that reference it.