Database Migration Safety Reviewer

The problem

Applying database migrations to production often leads to table locking, downtime, or application crashes during rolling deployments. Manual reviews frequently miss backward compatibility issues that only surface when old and new application versions run simultaneously.

What it does

• Identifies blocking DDL operations and long-running table rewrites that cause production outages.
• Validates backward and forward compatibility for mixed-version application deployments.
• Audits backfill scripts for idempotency, batching, and replication lag risks.
• Sequences constraint enforcement and index creation to prevent data integrity failures.
• Generates a step-by-step corrected migration plan with rollback and repair procedures.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

General-purpose LLMs often suggest "technically correct" SQL that is operationally fatal on large tables. This skill applies a specific safety rubric to check for lock duration, transaction boundaries, and partial-failure states that generic prompts overlook.

Use cases

• Reviewing zero-downtime schema changes for high-traffic Postgres or MySQL databases.
• Planning complex table splits, merges, or column renames without service interruption.
• Auditing large-scale data backfills to ensure they are resumable and rate-limited.
• Validating migration safety before a critical production release.

Known limitations

Cannot execute migrations or connect to live databases. Runtime estimates are static and unverified without production metrics.