Backend Migration Standards

What problem does it solve?

This Skill mitigates the risks associated with database schema changes, such as data loss, application downtime, or broken deployments. It ensures that all database evolutions are performed safely, reversibly, and with minimal impact on live systems.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Mandatory Reversibility: Ensures every migration includes a working rollback (down) method, allowing for safe recovery from deployment issues.
• Zero-Downtime Strategies: Guides on multi-step approaches for complex changes like column removal or renaming, and concurrent index creation to avoid locking production tables.
• Clear Naming & Separation: Enforces descriptive naming conventions for migration files and advocates for separating schema changes from data migrations for clarity and safety.
• Use Case: When adding a new email column to the users table, use this skill to ensure the migration is reversible, uses a default value for existing rows, and creates the index concurrently to avoid locking the table during deployment.

Quick Start

Apply the Backend Migration Standards skill to create a new migration that adds a 'status' column to the 'orders' table, ensuring it's nullable with a default value and includes a corresponding downgrade method.