How a Single Database Constraint Prevents Simultaneous Likes and Dislikes

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A developer building a reactions feature for a team forum in Go and SQLite encountered a bug where a user could register both a like and a dislike on the same post simultaneously. The naive fix of inserting a new row per click created duplicate reaction records, inflating both like and dislike counts incorrectly. The solution was adding a UNIQUE constraint on the combination of user ID, target type, and target ID directly in the database schema, making conflicting reactions structurally impossible. Application logic was then simplified to three clean outcomes: insert on first reaction, delete on repeat click, and update when switching between like and dislike. The developer noted that this single constraint eliminated the need for complex application-level validation code.

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