Rails migrations really fail to be viable at scale. And its not really because of the migrations in Rails, its because changes in PostgreSQL get very very expensive. Things have gotten better in PG 15, but its still not quite there yet.

I've ran into an integer PK being almost exhausted in values twice now. In one of these cases I used pg-osc to rewrite a 8TB table on disk without downtime over a period of a week to fix the issue. In the other case it was about 6TB within 2 days. Its doable, but the amount of planning and time it takes is non-trivial.

I so far have no found any other viable solutions either. I keep hearing about logical replication but I haven't seen a great real-world solution at scale so far.