I’ve been looking into workflows where database environments are kept in sync continuously rather than periodically fixing drift. The idea is to treat database state more like an artifact — capture a snapshot, diff it against another environment, and generate the exact changes needed to align them.

In theory, this sounds like a natural extension of CI/CD: environments stay consistent, rollbacks are clearer, and drift becomes visible early. In practice, I’m not sure how many teams actually operationalize this versus relying on migrations and occasional manual reconciliation.

Questions for folks running production systems:

* Are you actively syncing dev, staging, and prod schemas, or just managing forward migrations? * How do you handle intentional divergence between environments? * Does this live inside pipelines, or is it more of an operational task? * Any reliability or safety concerns when automating schema alignment? * How do ephemeral environments and preview databases fit into this model?

Trying to understand whether continuous syncing is realistic at scale, or if it introduces more risk than it solves.

For context, this article triggered the thought process: https://blog.sonichigo.com/how-diffchangelog-and-snapshots-work-together