We have an entity and a corresponding table in the database with one additional column which contains digested hash of the entity fields, calculated each time programmatically in application. Entity has associations with two additional tables/entities which fields also take part in hashing.
Now a decision was made to get rid of one of the fields from the main entity (boolean flag) and exclude it from hashing, since it makes two otherwise identical entities get different hashes when one entity has its flag set to true, while other is false. Since hashes are different both entities get stored in the database, which is not what we want.
Removing the field is simple, but we also need to re-calculate hashes for entities which have been already stored in the database. Since there might be duplicates, we also need to get rid of one of two duplicated entries. This whole operation must be done once after migration.
The stack we use is Quarkus, Flyway, Hibernate with Panache, and PostgreSQL. I have tried to use Flyway callbacks with Event.AFTER_MIGRATE to get all existing entities from the db, but I can't use Panache since its not initialised yet by the time callback hits. Using plain java.sql.* Connection and Statement is pretty cumbersome, cause I need to fetch data from 3 tables, create entity from all of the fields, re-calculate hash and put it back, while taking care of possible conflicts. Another option would be to create a new REST API endpoint specifically for the job which the client will have to call after app has booted, but somehow I don't feel that that is the best solution.
How do you tackle this kind of a situation?
