> while it's pretty easy to do schema migrations, it's not easier than _not_ doing them. Regardless of whether you are dealing with a strict schema or flexible

> while it's pretty easy to do schema migrations, it's not easier than _not_ doing them. Regardless of whether you are dealing with a strict schema or flexible schema, you still have to make changes to how you structure your data as you are prototyping or otherwise iterating on it. MongoDB provides no tangible benefit in this case. If you want to rename a field, then you still need to run an update. How are ad hoc, manual, historically opaque tweaks to data in any way better than an easily generated and version controlled series of scripts representing a replayable history of changes to the data? If anything, manual untracked tweaks make "rapid prototyping" more difficult since lots of partially or completely undocumented changes to the structure of the data are harder to revert, replay, reason about, or share with others. It's also more work to do it manually since you need to run the commands in multiple environments, rather than just entering the same command or, more frequently, a shortcut command into a generated file.