Unbounded UPDATE or DELETE

Warning — this works, but blocks traffic or rewrites data at scale.

What it catches

A WHERE-less UPDATE/DELETE rewrites or removes every row in a single transaction: it locks all rows for the duration, doubles the table in dead tuples, floods WAL, and stalls replicas. Backfills belong in batched jobs, not migrations.

Fires on

UPDATE orders SET region = 'eu';

Do this instead

Move the backfill to a batched job: update or delete a bounded set per transaction, commit, repeat until done. Each batch releases its row locks, keeps dead-tuple churn vacuumable, and lets replicas keep up — and a failure resumes instead of rolling back hours of work.

-- From a job, not a migration — bounded batches, commit each:
--    UPDATE orders SET region = 'eu'
--    WHERE id IN (SELECT id FROM orders WHERE region IS NULL LIMIT 5000);
-- loop until 0 rows updated

Catch this before it ships

This rule runs locally in the free CLI — or with the full corpus through the hosted service: npx bolvrk check migration.sql

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