At my current company I lead the SRE team, but previously had been a developer and worked on a couple of products, one that ran in production for about 8 years (and is still running, in maintenance-only mode.)

The new development team has decided to write a new system to replace the old one and they frequently ask us to run ad-hoc SQL statements to clean up records and patch up issues caused by bugs.

In my ~8 years of working on the existing app, I can probably count on one hand the number of times we needed to run ad-hoc SQL scripts against production data (almost always after importing data from an other system), everything else was handled with migrations.

I'm seeing about 3-5 ad-hoc scripts needing to be run per-release. Just curious if this is at all normal or if I'm just expecting too much.

If you're wondering why I might have a problem with this at all, it's because at least 50% of the time there is also a problem with the SQL script and it either doesn't do the right thing or it has syntax errors. It feels like it was just "thrown over the wall".