My humble opinion is that poor choices in database design are the source of a great deal of technical debt. I used to avoid making schema changes as they were

My humble opinion is that poor choices in database design are the source of a great deal of technical debt. I used to avoid making schema changes as they were "scary" (until I got a decent understanding of Django Migrations). Just a quick hack to make up for it in the application layer was far easier. Then another, and another until you have real mess on your hands. And avoid nulls when you can. Unfortunately most of the time I have had a new database design there is existing data in excel sheets that is messy and you can't avoid it.