#Backfills

Articles about Backfills — exploring patterns, best practices, and real-world implementations in production systems.

1 post tagged with backfills. ← Blog home

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Pratik Dhanave · ·4 min read

Backfills at Scale — Rewriting a Billion Rows Under Live Traffic

The expand phase created an empty column; something has to fill it for a billion existing rows while production traffic continues oblivious. Backfills are the manual labor of migrations — conceptually trivial, operationally where migrations actually spend their calendar time and take their production risks. The craft is entirely in the adverbs: incrementally, throttled, resumably, idempotently.

Backfills are made safe by four adverbs: incrementally (keyset-walked, time-sized, per-batch-committed), throttled (a control loop yielding to replication lag, content to take days), resumably (transactional checkpoints), idempotently (absolute writes, safe re-runs). The transform is reviewed code with a verify-only mode.

#Migrations#Databases#Backfills#Reliability

All posts on this site are written by Pratik Dhanave, an Agentic AI Architect with 7+ years building production distributed systems, multi-agent AI platforms, and cloud-native infrastructure. About the author → Each article includes working code, architecture diagrams, and references to the specific frameworks and standards discussed. Browse the blog or explore related topics using the tag cloud above.