planetscale-vitess-safety-review

---
name: planetscale-vitess-safety-review
description: Review a PlanetScale Vitess database for safe migrations, deploy requests, schema recommendations, Insights, webhooks, and operational safety.
---

# Vitess safety review

## Purpose

Recommend best practices for a PlanetScale Vitess database. Focus on production safety, deployability, observability, and agent-safe automation. Do not apply any changes.

## Primary safety features to evaluate

### Safe migrations

Check whether safe migrations are enabled on production and staging branches.

Recommend enabling safe migrations when:

- The branch receives production traffic.
- The team runs DDL outside deploy requests.
- There is no protected branch workflow.
- The application is expected to evolve schema frequently.

Explain the tradeoff: safe migrations reject direct DDL on protected branches and force schema changes through deploy requests. That is a feature, but it can break teams relying on direct production DDL. Treat enablement as a behavior-changing change requiring approval.

### Deploy requests

Check:

- Whether deploy requests are used for schema changes.
- Whether administrator approval is required.
- Whether deploy requests are reviewed for data loss, conflicts, lint errors, foreign key problems, charset issues, and shard impact.
- Whether teams use gated deployments for cutover control.
- Whether “deploy instantly” is used and whether the team understands it removes the gated-deployment/revert shape.
- Whether cutover is regularly delayed by long-running transactions.
- Whether deploy request events are subscribed to via webhooks.

Recommend:

- Require deploy requests for production schema changes.
- Enable administrator approval for production deploy requests when there is more than one administrator.
- In a single-admin organization, administrator approval does not stop an agent that acts as that admin:
  the admin who opens a deploy request can also approve it. If the goal is to keep agents from
  self-approving, give the agent a separate user, or a service token without deploy request
  approval permission.
- Prefer normal safe deployments over instant deployments unless the migration is known to be instant-safe and the rollback story is acceptable.
- Use gated deployment when cutover timing matters.
- Treat “force cutover now” as an operator-controlled action for delayed
  cutovers: it aggressively stops running transactions to complete schema
  cutover. Recommend reviewing the blocking workload and incident context
  before use, and only recommend the database-level aggressive cutover default
  when frequent cutover blocking is understood and accepted.

### Schema revert

Check whether the team knows the revert window and whether their incident runbook includes it.

Recommend documenting:

- How to identify a bad schema migration.
- How to revert within the supported window.
- Who is authorized to revert.
- Which application deploy should be rolled back together with the schema revert.

### Branch strategy

Recommend a branch topology:

- `main` or equivalent production branch with safe migrations enabled.
- `staging` branch based from production with safe migrations enabled.
- Short-lived development branches based from staging.
- Deploy requests from development to staging, then staging to production when appropriate.

Do not create branches without approval.

### Query Insights

Review Insights for:

- Slow queries.
- Queries reading too many rows.
- Erroring queries.
- Queries with poor index usage.
- For sharded databases, whether query patterns use relevant vindexes and how
  vindex usage changes after index or routing changes.
- Unusual query volume.
- Missing SQL comment tags.
- Tag breakdowns when built-in metadata or SQLCommenter tags are present:
  `tag:key:value` filtering in the dashboard, and the `insights/tags` and
  `insights/tags/summaries` API endpoints for programmatic breakdowns.
- Deploy correlation data.

Recommend enabling or improving application query tagging so Insights can attribute queries to app, route, controller, action, job, deployment SHA, and feature.

### Anomalies

Review active and recent anomalies.

Recommend:

- Subscribe `branch.anomaly` webhooks to the team’s alerting or automation system.
- Route anomaly payloads to a triage workflow that opens an issue or agent task.
- Correlate anomalies with deploy requests, application deploys, and query tags.
- Do not automatically apply schema or code changes from anomaly events; generate a proposal or PR only.

### Schema recommendations

Review open schema recommendations.

For each recommendation, capture:

- Type: add index, remove redundant index, primary key exhaustion, unused table, legacy charset/collation, or other.
- Affected table and keyspace.
- Supporting query telemetry.
- DDL.
- Expected benefit.
- Risk.
- Test plan.

Recommend implementation path:

- Convert the recommendation into an application migration or PlanetScale branch schema change.
- Open a deploy request.
- Review generated DDL and shard impact.
- Benchmark or validate on a branch.
- Deploy with safe migrations.
- Monitor Insights and anomaly state after deployment.

Do not apply recommendations directly.

### Backups and restore

Check backup posture and restore runbooks.

Recommend:

- Verify automated backups exist.
- Run a non-production restore drill periodically.
- Document restore target, RPO/RTO expectation, and application cutover plan.
- For sharded databases, document shard-aware restore expectations.

### Sharding and keyspace safety

If the database is sharded, review:

- Keyspaces and shards.
- Vschema.
- Cross-shard query patterns.
- Whether schema deploy requests show per-shard impact.
- Whether queries use shard-friendly access paths.

Recommend an agent-safe sharding review only as a proposal. Never reshard, change vschema, or alter routing automatically.

## Webhook recommendations for Vitess

Evaluate and recommend webhooks for:

- `branch.anomaly`
- `branch.primary_promoted`
- `branch.ready`
- `branch.sleeping`
- `cluster.storage`
- `keyspace.storage`
- `deploy_request.opened`
- `deploy_request.queued`
- `deploy_request.in_progress`
- `deploy_request.pending_cutover`
- `deploy_request.schema_applied`
- `deploy_request.errored`
- `deploy_request.reverted`
- `deploy_request.closed`
- `branch.schema_recommendation` if available in the webhook API for the customer’s database

Recommended destinations:

- Alerting for anomaly, primary promotion, storage, and deploy errors.
- Slack or internal notifications for deploy request lifecycle.
- Agent intake queue for schema recommendations and anomalies, with PR-only output by default.

## Output

Return:

- Current Vitess safety posture.
- Missing safety features.
- Recommended workflow.
- Recommended webhook subscriptions.
- Schema recommendation triage table.
- Deploy safety gaps.
- Proposed changes requiring approval.

End with:

“No Vitess changes have been applied.”

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