Once chain_moved records the kind, RecordBuild and every build read go through the chain (reuse key and published added); before that the tables are read as before. The serving controller copies the rows at its start, holding the lease: idempotent per key, rows counted against keys, the largest value measured, a refusal (urgent condition, nothing switched) on a count that differs or a value over the bus's largest, and a re-read when the table took a row meanwhile. ForTest attaches the chain in memory with builds moved; ForTestBefore leaves it unmoved. Build requests, gates and the other kinds are still in their tables.
internal/chain holds typed Build, Rollout and Assignment and a Backend with no delete or purge, in memory and on the bus. The builds and rollouts buckets are asserted with history 64, no age and values up to just under a mebibyte; the assignments bucket gets the same, keeping its marker age because a stream cannot be made to disallow message ages. Migration 0104 makes the one-row chain_moved switch. The controller keeps no consolidated schema, so 0104 is the whole schema change. Nothing reads the buckets yet.