doctrine-transactions_skill

Overview

This skill helps evolve Symfony Doctrine models and database schema safely, emphasizing data integrity, runtime performance, and controlled rollouts. It guides transactional boundaries, mapping changes, and targeted testing to avoid regressions and runtime surprises. It produces concrete entity and migration changes plus validation and rollback notes.

How this skill works

The skill inspects entity ownership, cardinality, and transactional scopes to recommend mapping and migration changes. It evaluates fetch and query patterns to detect N+1 risks and over-fetching, then suggests tuning (fetch modes, joins, indexes). It outputs migration scripts or diffs, integrity decisions, performance trade-offs, and verification steps including tests and rollback plans.

When to use it

• Designing or refactoring entity relations and ownership
• Introducing schema evolution or database migrations in production
• Addressing performance issues caused by Doctrine fetch/query patterns
• Hardening transactional boundaries to prevent partial commits or data races
• Preparing staged rollouts for risky mapping changes

Best practices

• Model clear owning and inverse sides; keep associations coherent to avoid orphaned state
• Break destructive migrations into smaller, reversible steps across releases
• Define transaction boundaries around use-case intents, not ORM internals
• Tune fetch behavior for hot paths: prefer explicit joins or DTO queries over eager collection loading
• Verify lifecycle events and cascades with targeted unit and integration tests before rollout

Example use cases

• Convert a ManyToMany association into an explicit join entity with safe migration steps
• Split a large entity with many associations to reduce fetch cost on common queries
• Add a new nullable column, backfill data with batched migrations, then make it non-nullable in a later release
• Detect and eliminate an N+1 caused by lazy-loading collections on a critical endpoint
• Introduce optimistic locking or shorter transaction scopes to reduce contention on high-write tables