Prisma Expand-and-Contract Migrations

Safe, zero-downtime database schema changes with Prisma ORM.

When to Use

• Renaming columns or tables in production
• Changing column types (e.g., String to Enum)
• Adding non-nullable columns to tables with existing data
• Splitting or merging tables
• Any schema change that could break running instances during deployment

The Pattern

Split destructive changes into three phases across multiple deployments: