>Instead of changing all the rows in a single big transaction, the change was broken into thousands of little changes that were rolled out over a series of days

>Instead of changing all the rows in a single big transaction, the change was broken into thousands of little changes that were rolled out over a series of days. Having been in a situation where a large schema update required migrating data in a transaction, which then broke for some data, but the data was so big that rolling back the transaction caused the database to become totally hosed, I can see this technique being very attractive.