schema_locked, which prevents users from altering tables in order to have a guaranteed period of no schema changes, is a huge win for changefeed scalability. In production we've seen dramatic latency improvements using schema_locked in systems where a changefeed node is watching 4k ranges. However, today users must set schema_locked manually, and then go through a multistep process of unlocking, altering, and re-locking a table whenever they want to alter the table.

If this could be automated so that tables are automatically locked, and only unlocked during a schema change, this would remove the burden on the user and improve the experience and performance for all changefeed users.

Jira issue: CRDB-41681