Trigger remediation

Jan 2024 - ongoing/Tech lead

Led the deprecation of brittle DB triggers and stored procedures by translating their behavior into testable, domain-shaped services in the application layer.

47
triggers retired
3 teams
coordinated across
0
behavior regressions
Role
Tech lead
Timeline
Jan 2024 - ongoing
Stack
PostgreSQL, PHP, PHPUnit
Tags
Postgres, Refactor

§Context

A decade of business rules had quietly migrated into Postgres triggers and stored procedures. They were correct, mostly, but invisible to the application, untestable, and a constant source of surprise during incidents.

§What I did

  • Built a small framework for capturing existing trigger behavior as characterization tests, so we could refactor without trusting our memory of the spec.
  • Translated each trigger into a domain-shaped service in PHP, leaving the trigger in place as a verifier until the new path matched 1:1.
  • Coordinated three teams' rollouts on a shared cutover plan, so no two teams were moving the same surface at once.

§Outcome

47 triggers retired so far, zero observable behavior changes, and a small library of patterns the next team picked up without asking.