Flyway can check a target environment for drift, validating that no unexpected changes have been made since Flyway was last used to deploy to the database.

This is most commonly used ahead of a deployment, ensuring that the target environment is still in the expected state for executing the deployment.

When deploying using migrations, drift will likely only cause an immediate problem if objects have drifted which are being modified in the migrations being deployed. Migration deployment will otherwise naturally ignore any drift.

When deploying from the schema model, drift will be reverted as part of the deployment, unless ignored using comparison filters.

If you are using SQL Monitor, you can get drift alerts.  

What is 'Schema Drift'?

Schema Drift occurs when a target database deviates from the codebase that was used to originally deploy it.

In this example, modifications were made to the live database after Version 1.2 was released. This effectively created a new version of the schema outside source control.

This could cause a problem when Version 1.3 is deployed, because the deployment package will expect the target database to be in the state of Version 1.2.

How to run drift analysis

• Checking production environments for drift