Large snapshots crash Github

[Ciaran0]

Our snapshots have grown quite large, we have some postgres views defined which seems to be contributing to this.
This regularly causes github to crash when rendering.

Anyone have any advice/ workarounds for this?

[manimovassagh]

GitHub has a hard limit on rendered file sizes in diffs and PRs — anything over ~1MB will fail to render, and large JSON snapshots from Drizzle (especially with Postgres views) hit this easily.

Here are a few approaches that have worked well:

1. Mark snapshots as generated files in .gitattributes

This is the quickest win. Tell GitHub not to try rendering snapshot diffs inline:

drizzle/meta/*.json linguist-generated=true
drizzle/*.sql linguist-generated=true

This collapses them in PR diffs — you'll see "generated file" with a toggle instead of the full diff. Prevents the crash and actually makes PRs much easier to review.

2. Split your schema into multiple files by domain

Instead of one giant schema file, break it up:

src/db/schema/
  users.ts
  products.ts
  analytics.ts     # views go here

Then in your drizzle config:

export default defineConfig({
  schema: './src/db/schema/*',
  // ...
});

This keeps individual migration and snapshot diffs smaller since changes are scoped to their domain.

3. Consider gitignoring snapshots and only committing SQL migrations

Some teams add drizzle/meta/ to .gitignore and only commit the .sql migration files. The snapshots can be regenerated from the schema + migrations. The tradeoff: you need to run drizzle-kit generate locally to recreate them, and new contributors need to do the same after cloning.

4. Reduce view definition size

If your Postgres views have very long SQL definitions, consider creating them in raw SQL migrations instead of inlining the full SELECT in the Drizzle schema. This keeps the snapshot smaller since the view body won't be serialized into the JSON.

// Instead of this (large inline definition):
export const myView = pgView('my_view').as((qb) => 
  qb.select(/* huge query */).from(/* ... */)
);

// Use an existing view reference:
export const myView = pgView('my_view', {
  id: integer('id'),
  name: text('name'),
  // just declare the columns
}).existing();

Then manage the view creation in a manual migration.

I'd start with approach #1 (.gitattributes) since it takes 10 seconds and immediately fixes the GitHub rendering issue.