[grogers]

Maintaining backwards compatibility for reading old records in code is not hard. You can always rewrite all rows to the newer format if you want to remove the conpat code, or if the structure changes in an incompatible way. It's pretty comparable to what you have to do to evolve the code/schema safely together.

Having schema is much better for ad-hoc queries though, doubly so if your schemaless types aren't JSON (e.g. protobufs).