Data Model Audit

Goal

Audit persistence models, schema invariants, migrations, query boundaries, and domain data ownership. Keep only reachable issues that can cause data corruption, inconsistent behavior, broken migrations, query bugs, or unsafe future changes.

Inspect

Database schemas, migrations, ORM models, generated types, repositories/DAOs, service/domain layers, transactions, constraints/indexes, seed data, background jobs, cache/index sync, import/export flows, API schemas, UI assumptions, tests, fixtures, docs, and generated maps when present.

Issue classes

• Invariants: required business rules enforced only in UI, missing database/domain constraints, inconsistent enum/state-machine handling, nullable fields with unsafe assumptions, and invalid transitions.
• Migrations: non-idempotent or unsafe migration order, data backfill gaps, missing rollback/forward strategy, generated type drift, and schema changes not reflected in code/tests.
• Ownership and boundaries: domain rules split across handlers/components/workers, duplicated query filters, repository/service bypasses, and unclear source of truth for writes.
• Relationships and tenancy: missing foreign keys/cascade policy where repo expects them, orphan records, wrong uniqueness scope, unsafe tenant/workspace/project scoping, and inconsistent soft-delete behavior.
• Query behavior: N+1 hot paths, unstable ordering/pagination, missing indexes for reachable filters, race conditions, transaction gaps, and cache/index invalidation drift.
• Import/export/sync: partial failure handling, duplicate prevention, external ID stability, replay/idempotency, and stale derived artifacts.
• Regression resistance: missing fixtures/tests for constraints, migrations, state transitions, concurrency, tenant isolation, and data repair/backfill.

Trace and hand off

Choose an entity identity and legal/illegal transition or write that distinguishes the required invariant. Follow schema constraints, transaction owner, readers and derived projections, including existing records affected by migration. Pass the violating record/state, source of truth, reader/writer window and expected persisted result to Improve Data Model. A generated type matching the new schema does not establish valid old data or mixed-version behavior.