As a Flyway user you can now be alerted to drift, namely any database changes deployed to your downstream environments, such as QA and Production, that were made outside of your Flyway process. 

These changes may have been made in good faith, for example to quickly deploy an emergency production hotfix. However, there may also be unexpected changes made by individuals who have simply bypassed the correct procedures. 

Either way, if changes have been made to downstream environments outside of the Flyway process, it invalidates the integrity of tests executed upstream by developers and testers as these will have been run against a database schema state that is different to production. 

At best drift can be harmless, but there is always the risk that drift could result in deployment failures. This is why Flyway now offers database drift checks as part of Flyway Pipelines, which will highlight out-of-process changes that you may not have been aware of.   

View our Sample Project 

To get a taste of what a drift report looks like, check out a sample project in Flyway Pipelines here.  

Minimal configuration is required to enable drift checks in your pipeline today and in return it will provide you and your team with confidence that you will be alerted to all unexpected changes, allowing you to address these before database deployment issues arise.  To find out how to enable Drift Checks today follow our onboarding guide which can be found here