This reduces chances of errors where consumers of strings mutate inputs
and reduces memory usage of the app.
Test suite passes now, but there may be some stuff left, so we will run
a few sites on a branch prior to merging
This moves us away from the delayed drops pattern which
was problematic on two counts. First, it uses a hardcoded "delay for"
duration which may be too short for certain deployment strategies.
Second, delayed drop doesn't ensure that it only runs after
the latest application code has been deployed. If the migration runs
and the application code fails to deploy, running the migration after
"delay for" has been met will cause the application to blow up.
The new strategy allows post deployment migrations to be skipped if the
env `SKIP_POST_DEPLOYMENT_MIGRATIONS` is provided.
```
SKIP_POST_DEPLOYMENT_MIGRATIONS=1 rake db:migrate
-> deploy app servers
SKIP_POST_DEPLOYMENT_MIGRATIONS=0 rake db:migrate
```
To aid with the generation of a post deployment migration, a generator
has been added. Simply run `rails generate post_migration`.
Often we need to amend our schema, it is tempting to use
drop_table, rename_column and drop_column to amned schema
trouble though is that existing code that is running in production
can depend on the existance of previous schema leading to application
breaking until new code base is deployed.
The commit enforces new rules to ensure we can never drop tables or
columns in migrations and instead use Migration::ColumnDropper and
Migration::TableDropper to defer drop the db objects
Sam Saffron
David Taylor
Guo Xiang Tan
Gerhard Schlager