The changes to the _compat tables should not affect anything.
We will deploy the change early next week (Tuesday - 3/12/2019). In most cases, if a table isn’t working for your tool or app anymore because of the change, you can switch to a table named $tablename_compat and it will appear to have the same schema, but it is recommended that comment references use a join to the new comment table on a “comment_id” field instead where possible.
Brooke Storm
Operations Engineer
Wikimedia Cloud Services
IRC: bstorm_