The relational database model has been around for over forty years, but it has not adapted as much for metadata changes at scale as other software systems have. Traditionally, developers would plan schema changes months ahead and take the system down for maintenance to apply those changes. However, with modern development practices that emphasize continuous deployment and accelerated release cycles, relational databases are struggling to keep up. The current landscape requires highly available services that can operate around the clock, but relational databases still pose an operational barrier to continuous deployment. To address this challenge, a new paradigm is proposed that prioritizes non-blocking, lightweight, asynchronous, scheduled, interruptible, trackable, failure-agnostic, revertible, redeployable, and declarative schema migrations. These principles aim to give developers the confidence to deploy with velocity while minimizing operational considerations.