[domano]

Bold of you to flat out drop down migrations.

I guess having a new up migration to cover the case is better, but its nice to have a documented way of rolling back (which would be the down migration) - without applying it programmatically. But it helps if other team members can see how a change should be rolled back ideally.

[peterldowns]

Glenjamin gave a great answer. I’ll just add that in my experience (being responsible for the team’s database, at a few companies over the years), down migrations are NEVER helpful when a migration goes wrong. Roll-forward is the only correct model. Besides, there are plenty of migrations that cant be safely rolled back, so most “down migrations” either destroy data or don’t work (or both.)

[glenjamin]

The key here is that in production it's almost always not safe to actually apply a down migration - so it's better to make that clear than to pretend there's some way to reverse an irreversible operation.