Section 5. Conclusion

Sooner or later, everything is subjected to change. Even if you “prefactor” during development, you will not be able to avoid refactoring. Without emergent design—that is, without openness to changes in design—there can be no Agility. Thus enabling emergence of design is a prerequisite to Agility.

The question is not “Can we have emergent design within a database?” That question implies that it might be acceptable to have an old-school, Waterfall database holding back an Agile project. Not only has this short cut proven that database changes can be done, but it’s readily apparent that regular, well-tested change to databases must be done.

We cannot be sure what the next big breakthrough in data definition will be. In due ...

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