Muhammad Aqeel: Undo for Postgres, without losing the rest of your day

pgVolvra is an open-source SQL tool for undoing accidental changes in PostgreSQL without restoring a backup and manually reconciling rows. It records changes to selected tables, lets users inspect history and preview an undo, and can reconstruct a table’s past state without modifying live data. Undo can target a time window, transaction, database role, application identity, named mark, or selected rows across tables. The central safety feature is conflict detection: if a row has changed since the mistake, the operation stops rather than overwrite newer work. Users can skip conflicting rows, but cannot force an overwrite; row limits also guard against unexpectedly broad operations. An optional warning flags statements that affect unusually many rows.

History can remain in ordinary database tables or be streamed by a companion process to external JSON archives, so it can survive database loss. After restoring a backup, archived changes can be replayed to recover later work; tests report exact recovery after a real database deletion and restore. The tool installs without an extension or superuser privileges and has been verified on Supabase, Neon, and pgEdge Starfleet. Recording history has measurable costs: write throughput falls 11-41%, each change uses about 300-400 bytes, and WAL volume roughly doubles. It requires primary keys and only covers changes made after setup; it is not a backup or full point-in-time recovery system, and replay does not restore schema changes or sequences.