Migrations Are Confessions

Every schema change is a sentence about something the original author got wrong.

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Every schema change is a sentence about something the original author got wrong. Not maliciously — just earlier, with less information, under different constraints. The migration file is a footnote to a decision made by someone who could not see this far ahead, and it is your job to write the footnote without contempt.

Good migrations are reversible in spirit even when they are not reversible in SQL. They leave a paper trail. They explain, in the commit message if nowhere else, why the old shape was reasonable and why the new shape is now necessary. Future maintainers inherit not just the schema but the reasoning.

Treat each migration as a small act of historiography. The table is a record of what the team believed about the domain on the day the column was added. Change it carefully, and document the change like someone will one day need to argue with it.