Obsessing over database schema rollbacks is a bad idea. They may seem useful on small systems, but the real world is distributed: you can rollback the schema but not the operations that affected other systems, so you end up with an inconsistent system.
Forget rollbacks. Make subsystems easy to quickly disable if they start acting out (e.g. feature flags), and learn to fix my moving forward.
Nicolas Martyanoff /
npub1dk…h54dt
2025-01-24 12:12:09
Author Public Key
npub1dkg70vzk4vvfsc5cup9gkfu2tcrs5unysl7npfvegf78nkuswr5skh54dtPublished at
2025-01-24 12:12:09Event JSON
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"content": "Obsessing over database schema rollbacks is a bad idea. They may seem useful on small systems, but the real world is distributed: you can rollback the schema but not the operations that affected other systems, so you end up with an inconsistent system.\n\nForget rollbacks. Make subsystems easy to quickly disable if they start acting out (e.g. feature flags), and learn to fix my moving forward.",
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