A Subscription that had been correctly scoped in 2023 and had acquired a usage counter written thousands of times a day.
the consistency question, asked again:
plan + entitlements must be consistent within a
transaction. still true.
usage counters written by a metering job every
few seconds, read monthly.
never consistent with anything.
the symptom that forced the question: lock waits
between a plan change and the metering job, on the
same row, at about 40 a day.
An aggregate boundary is correct at a point in time and stops being correct when the write pattern changes, which nothing prompts anybody to re-examine. The lock waits were the prompt and they had been growing for eight months — the metric that would have surfaced it earlier is lock wait time per table, which nobody graphs.