What is drift detection?

Last updated: July 31, 2025

Drift detection is useful in determining what is different when deploying to a single database or determining what is different between two target databases to ensure that they are in sync.

Liquibase can generate the missing changesets, which can either be applied to a database or marked as run to ensure that the Liquibase project is also in sync with the database.

There are two general scenarios where drift detection is used:

  • Comparing a single database's current state against a previous state

  • Comparing the current state of two target databases with diff-changelog.

Drift report functionality

Liquibase also allows you to generate a Drift Report every time you run the diff and diff-changelog command. The Drift Report is a human-readable report of any database drift in your system. You can easily integrate the Drift Report into your CI/CD pipeline.