netlify-database-operational-footguns

netlify-database-operational-footguns is a cursor rule for coding agents from netlify/context-and-tools. It costs 17 tokens per session (859 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A reference guide to operational failure risks in Netlify Database, a hosted database service used by websites and applications. It focuses on problems involving the older Netlify Neon extension and unclaimed databases.

In plain words
What is it for?
It is for checking database ownership warnings, telling users when a legacy database is at risk, and planning a move to the current Netlify Database service.
Why use it?
It helps prevent accidental data loss when an old database has not been linked to a Neon account and is scheduled for automatic deletion.

Cursor rule

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add rules/netlify/context-and-tools/netlify-database-operational-footguns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/netlify/context-and-tools

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for netlify-database-operational-footguns

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/netlify/context-and-tools/netlify-database-operational-footguns.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/rules/netlify/context-and-tools/netlify-database-operational-footguns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/rules/netlify/context-and-tools/netlify-database-operational-footguns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/rules/netlify/context-and-tools/netlify-database-operational-footguns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 17 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 859 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00017 $0.00859
Opus 5 $0.00009 $0.00430
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.00172
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00086

Measured 5d ago against content hash 32af2f0cdfb6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

netlify-database-operational-footguns scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

cursor/rules/netlify-database-operational-footguns.mdc · 32 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 32 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Netlify Database — operational footguns

Real-world failure modes that don't show up in a happy-path build but bite in production or previews.

An unclaimed legacy-extension database is on a deletion timer

The old @netlify/neon extension flow provisioned each database as an unclaimed Neon resource that the user had to claim into their own Neon account within a short grace period (about a week). If that window closes without the claim being completed, the database is automatically deleted — along with all its data. So if you land on an @netlify/neon project and see any sign the claim was never finished (no linked Neon account, a dashboard banner warning that the database is unclaimed or will be deleted), treat it as urgent: tell the user their data is at risk and that they must complete the claim in the Netlify/Neon dashboard to keep it, then plan a move to Netlify Database (GA). Claiming is a dashboard/account action the user performs — never try to claim, rescue, or back up the database through side-channel API calls, and don't assume the data is safe just because the app still reads from it today. (This claim step is specific to the legacy extension; Netlify Database (GA) never needs claiming.)

Create the database client once, at module scope — never per request

Put const db = getDatabase() (or the Drizzle export const db = drizzle({ schema })) at the top level of the module and import that shared instance where you need it. Calling getDatabase() or constructing a new client inside a handler opens a fresh Postgres connection on every request; under load that exhausts the connection limit (the limit scales with compute size, but per-invocation clients blow through any of them) and requests start failing with "too many connections" errors. Instantiate once, reuse across invocations.

Scale-to-zero cold starts

Netlify Database scales database compute to zero after a period of inactivity (a few minutes idle by default) and restarts it on the next query. The practical consequence: the first query after an idle period is slower while the compute wakes up, then subsequent queries run at full speed again. This is expected scale-to-zero behavior — not a bug, a misconfiguration, or a connection leak — and it shows up most on low-traffic sites and preview branches.

Read the full file on GitHub · 32 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 32 lines · 17 tokens per session scan A 32af2f0cdfb6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

netlify-database-operational-footguns is a cursor rule published in the GitHub repository netlify/context-and-tools (36 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 17 tokens to every session and 859 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.