alembic_skill

Overview

This skill provides comprehensive Alembic database migration management tailored for customer support systems. It guides setup, migration creation, data transformations, branching, merging, testing, and safe production deployment. The focus is on preserving data integrity, reducing downtime, and enabling team collaboration across environments.

How this skill works

It inspects your SQLAlchemy models and the target database to generate, run, and verify migration scripts. It supports manual and autogenerate workflows, data migrations with batching, branch-based development, and merge resolutions. Commands and examples show how to run upgrades, downgrades, inspect history, and integrate migrations into CI tests.

When to use it

• Setting up versioned schema changes for support systems
• Applying complex data migrations that preserve customer data
• Coordinating schema changes across feature, hotfix, and team branches
• Automating migrations in CI/CD pipelines and test databases
• Rolling back problematic releases with minimal downtime

Best practices

• Keep alembic.ini and env.py configured to read credentials from environment variables
• Always review autogenerated migrations before applying to staging or production
• Perform data migrations in batches for large tables to avoid memory/timeouts
• Write reversible upgrade/downgrade logic and include tests that apply migrations to a fresh test DB
• Use branch labels and version-paths for parallel development and create explicit merge revisions when combining heads

Example use cases

• Add customer satisfaction tables via autogenerate then review indexes and constraints
• Perform a status enum migration with an intermediate column and a reversible mapping
• Compute and persist resolution time for legacy tickets using batched updates
• Create a reporting branch for BI changes and merge into main with a merge revision
• Run migrations in CI tests to validate schema changes before deployment