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World desk4 min

How Two URL Spellings Filled One Database With Duplicate Audit Rows

Juan Camilo Auriti traced repeated audits to a mismatch between the URL spelling used for lookup and the normalized spelling saved as the result.
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A scheduled audit job can run successfully and still repeat work forever if it selects a record using one URL spelling but saves the result under another. Juan Camilo Auriti described that mismatch after finding that example.com and example.com/ had become separate rows: in his account, the affected domain had 1,831 audit rows, and 86.9% of all audit rows were attributable to the issue.

Why the job kept auditing the same domain

The failure was a mismatch between the key used to find a record and the key used to store its audit result. The job selected a saved URL such as example.com, followed redirects during the audit, and normalized the result to example.com/. Its unique index compared raw strings, so it treated those spellings as different values. The result landed in a different row from the one the next run checked.

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Each audit could finish without an error while the overall loop failed to converge. Auriti put the underlying question plainly: “The loop simply never converged, because the key it read by and the key it wrote by were never the same key.”

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In Auriti’s account, one domain had 1,831 audit rows where he expected a few dozen. He reported that 86.9% of audit rows were attributable to this issue. After his backfill, that domain had 19 rows. These are author-reported figures from his incident, not an independent audit or a benchmark for other databases.

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What a unique index does—and does not—guarantee

A unique constraint protects the values presented to it. If the database receives two different strings, it can allow both even when the application regards them as the same URL. A uniqueness rule on raw URL strings is therefore not the same as uniqueness on a deliberately canonicalized URL.

Ask: “is the key I select by byte-identical to the key I write by?” If the answer is no, uniqueness alone will not stop this kind of repeat work. The selection path, audit result, and persistence path need to use the same key policy.

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Choose URL equivalence rules deliberately

Auriti’s example normalizer makes a specific set of choices: trim surrounding whitespace; add https:// when the input lacks a scheme; parse the URL; lowercase the scheme and host; remove a leading www.; drop default ports 80 and 443; and remove trailing path slashes while preserving / as the root path. Its key root-path detail is rstrip("/") or "/", which prevents a root URL from becoming an empty path.

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Adding a scheme before parsing matters for bare hostnames. Without it, a parser may treat the input as a path rather than a URL with a hostname.

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This is not a universal URL canonicalizer. Removing www assumes that the two hostnames represent the same entity; stripping a trailing slash assumes that paths such as /about and /about/ identify the same resource. Those are application policies, not universal HTTP rules. Keep distinctions that matter to your application, and define equivalence rules before using them for uniqueness.

Put the same normalizer on the record boundary

Normalize once at the boundary where an input URL becomes a record, before uniqueness checks and storage. Then use the resulting canonical key consistently for lookup and persistence. Applying normalization only after the audit, or only when inserting results, leaves selection and write paths free to disagree.

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When choosing a key strategy, decide what counts as equivalent across scheme, hostname, www, port, and path slash. Also decide how that rule is enforced at read and write boundaries and how existing collisions will be handled. The right policy depends on the application’s data model.

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Check whether raw spellings are splitting into groups

Auriti’s quick SQL diagnostic groups URLs after lowercasing and removing trailing slashes, then surfaces groups with multiple raw spellings. Adapt the expression to match the canonicalization rules your application actually intends to enforce; this query is not a substitute for defining those rules.

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SELECT lower(rtrim(url, '/')) AS normalized_url,
       COUNT(DISTINCT url) AS spelling_count,
       COUNT(*) AS row_count
FROM audits
GROUP BY lower(rtrim(url, '/'))
HAVING COUNT(DISTINCT url) > 1;

Compare the selected key with the key actually written by the job, rather than relying only on whether individual executions appear successful. Auriti said ordinary success logs and per-domain views did not reveal the accumulation; comparing raw and normalized keys across rows exposed it. He described the other diagnostic question as “is it erroring.” A job can be free of execution errors and still have a key-consistency bug.

Backfill existing records without losing the intended history

Applying a normalizer to existing rows can make previously distinct strings collide. Auriti’s described repair normalized rows, merged collisions, kept the earliest created_at, and retained the most recent result. That is one merge policy, not an automatic consequence of normalization: choose and verify rules that preserve the history and meaning your application needs before enforcing canonical uniqueness.

For the incident and its author-reported results, see Juan Camilo Auriti’s account on DEV Community, published September 22, 2026.

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