Today I got a very painful reminder of the importance of using transactions in database migrations.

Short summary

Database migrations without transactions risk partial updates and data corruption—a painful lesson the author recently learned. Transactions provide all-or-nothing semantics: either the entire migration succeeds or everything rolls back, preserving consistency. Always wrap migration steps in explicit transactions to prevent data loss and avoid production incidents.

• •Transactions ensure migration atomicity—all-or-nothing semantics prevent data corruption
• •Partial updates without transactions can silently corrupt database state in production
• •Best practice: always wrap migration steps in explicit transactions

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.