[evanelias]

Excellent question! The short answer is Skeema doesn't directly support renames yet. Renames are inherently more imperative than declarative, so they don't fit in well with the model. I've thought about handling them via tracking their history/state, but it would be hacky.

Two workarounds exist in Skeema currently:

* You can do the rename "out of band" (e.g. manually, rather than via `skeema push`), and then update your schema repo via `skeema pull`. This isn't ideal, but then again, table/col renames typically involve nasty code-deploy-order complexities to begin with (regardless of migration system): there's no way to rename something at the same exact instant that your new code goes live, and it's difficult/annoying to write code that can correctly interact with both names.

* For new empty tables, happily a rename is equivalent to drop-then-re-add. So this case is trivial, and Skeema can be configured to allow destructive changes only on empty tables.

I've written a bit more about this at https://github.com/skeema/skeema/blob/master/doc/requirement... , as well as the bottom of https://www.skeema.io/blog/2019/01/18/declarative/ .

[brlewis]

How about a column named x_no_wait_y declares a column named y, but if a column named x exists it's renamed?