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.