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pgdeadbolt

drop-column-or-table

Drop columns and tables in a later deploy.

Severity: warning · Lock: ACCESS EXCLUSIVE

Code that’s still running may select or write the column or table. ORMs that select every column can break too. And a drop can’t be undone without a backup.

Instead of

Section titled “Instead of”
ALTER TABLE users DROP COLUMN legacy_flags;

Do

Section titled “Do”
-- Deploy 1: stop reading and writing legacy_flags (many ORMs have an ignored-columns setting).
-- Deploy 2:
ALTER TABLE users DROP COLUMN legacy_flags;

To skip this rule for one statement, put -- pgdeadbolt-ignore drop-column-or-table on the line above it.