strong_migrations VS reshape

In the Rails world, the gem strong_migrations can be used to detect these: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations

The docs include a handy articulation of fixes.

gem "strong_migrations" - https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations | Helps devs write non-blocking migrations, a must-have.

Frameworks will have a preferred solution. We use Rails with the strong_migrations gem which is great: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations

There’s no real way to test, but you can use gems like https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations and not allow to merge branches unless they are up-to-date with main.

The strong migrations gem in Rails alerts when you're trying to make a migration that may be dangerous. Does anyone know an alternative for Javascript? Or maybe for raw SQL.

Half of the problems in this article are migration related.

I am extremely grateful that some people have created awesome libraries like strong migrations https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations. Even if you are not using rails, bookmark its readme, it is an awesome cheat-sheet when writing a migration.

I would suggest taking a look at strong migrations[1]. It's a rails project, but the readme does a great job explaining what it checks for and what safe alternative to use instead. I still link to their explanations in PRs for non-rails projects.

[1]: https://github.com/ankane/strong_migrations#checks

Cool stuff! Do you have any thoughts about how this compares to https://github.com/fabianlindfors/reshape?

From what I know, there is only one project that tries something close to this: the relatively recent Reshape. It uses Postgres views to expose the two versions of the schema and triggers to upgrade/downgrade the new data. It doesn’t do the constraints part as described above, but shows that this approach is possible. Combined with the Xata pull request based workflow, I think the ideal system described above is possible!

My idea is not unique. Reshape is similar, but bigger in scope.

This is precisely what I did for my automated zero-downtime migration tool and it works pretty well: https://github.com/fabianlindfors/reshape. At least for Postgres, simple views like these have almost no overhead as queries are simply rewritten for the underlying table.

Anybody interested in this subject might also be interested in a tool for Postgres I’ve been working on, Reshape: https://github.com/fabianlindfors/reshape. It aims to fully automate away all the pain and manual steps zero-downtime migrations normally requires :)

This post is absolutely terrific and has been been my main reference for Reshape, an automated, zero-downtime schema migration tool: https://github.com/fabianlindfors/reshape