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Database and hosting

Meeting: 4 September 2026, Google Meet with Calvin Rea. Team: Uzair Mahomed, Kevin Ebrahim, Tyron Van Tonder and Caleb Perumalsamy.

All stakeholder reviews

This retrospective record was prepared on 14 September from a team summary and repository evidence. It is not a transcript or a record of formal acceptance.

Feedback and decisions​

  • Reduce idle compute: Neon had consumed more than 100 compute-unit hours too quickly. The team accepted the availability concern and reduced background database activity without weakening persistence or request-time deadlines.
  • Keep relational storage: Broad conversion to JSON was not selected. Foreign keys, uniqueness, transactions and indexed relationships remain important. JSONB stays at suitable historical battle-snapshot boundaries.
  • Separate environments: A pipeline sharing production and testing within one Neon project was not adopted. Tyron separated the hosted projects; routine PR tests use ephemeral PostGIS. Production migrations remain guarded, operator-authorised work rather than an application-deployment side effect.

Implementation evidence​

PR #212 records idle-compute controls. The retained solution used a 30-minute production maintenance cadence, rejected intervals below 15 minutes, and allowed the pool to idle. Neon was configured with a 0.25 CU minimum and five-minute scale-to-zero delay. Request-time expiry checks remained authoritative.

The Neon/PostGIS setup, CI guide, test catalogue and database release procedure document environment isolation and release safeguards. These changes do not establish a measured reduction in hosted usage.

Meeting photo​

The team's Google Meet call with Calvin Rea

Kevin identified this repository photo as belonging to the meeting. It records the call, not acceptance of every decision.

Follow-up​

Record a dated Neon usage comparison and confirm production/test separation and obsolete-branch cleanup at release review. Omit account identifiers, connection details and private database values from evidence.

AI declaration​

Prepared and edited with assistance from Codex[gpt-5.6-sol], Codex-CLI[GPT-6] and Codex[GPT-6]. Meeting details and project separation were supplied by the team; implementation references retain their original review context.