Deprecate column without dropping / virtual migrations

[djeer]

Hi! We faced a problem that we cannot delete a column.

We use sqlc.embed a lot, and it is essentially is a star expansion over a table's columns, which gets transformed to all columns named individually in the query. The problem is, that if we have a column that we never use in our code, the final query still individually references this column. If we do DROP COLUMN, then a production deploy breaks running code because the column is not available and cause an incident.

The only path I see as a workaround is to:

1. Create unstaged migration
2. Run SQLC generate
3. Commit codegen without the migration in PR A
4. Commit migration in PR B
5. Deploy PR A
6. Deploy PR B

But it also contradicts our CI, which checks that codegen matched the code (need to disable CI checks) and there's also a chance other developer can merge something between A and B, so we have to schedule merge moratorium to do that.

Is there a way to deprecate a column that I am missing? We are using Encore for migrations, and it does not allow to add a "virtual" migrations that would be skipped.