This is a good starting point. One thing I'd add is the need to consider the effects of table locks during changes. It's a nasty surprise when you've tested you

This is a good starting point. One thing I'd add is the need to consider the effects of table locks during changes. It's a nasty surprise when you've tested your multi-stage process in dev, only to find during production updates that a long running select is blocking, or that your change causes request to queue until you exceed connection limits.