Rails Adds The Ability To Ignore Counter Cache Columns While They Are Backfilling

Rails 7.2 introduces a new feature to safely add counter cache columns to large existing tables. This improvement allows developers to ignore counter cache columns during backfilling, preventing inaccurate results from methods like size and any?. To implement this, developers can add a counter cache column, set it as inactive, backfill the data, and then activate the counter cache. This approach optimizes performance by reducing database queries and ensures data accuracy during the transition process.