Technical Glossary

The verifiable record of what changed, when, by whom, and under what approval — required for compliance audits and regulated environments.

The chronological log of all changes applied to a database, capturing who initiated each change and when it was executed.

The execution of database changes through a managed pipeline rather than manual coordination, enabling consistency and reproducibility.

The set of policies, controls, and audit practices that determine how database changes are proposed, reviewed, approved, and deployed.

An atomic, versioned unit of database change containing one or more schema modifications applied together as a single deployment.

A continuous integration and delivery workflow that automates the build, test, and deployment of code and database changes.

The use of tooling to enforce and evidence regulatory requirements — HITRUST, SOC 2, PCI-DSS — throughout the change management lifecycle.

The divergence between the intended state of a database schema — as defined in version control — and its actual state in a running environment.

The process of moving data or schema from one database environment to another, typically as part of an upgrade, consolidation, or platform change.

The end-to-end automated process that moves database changes from source control to production, with staged validation at each step.

The continuous comparison of a live database against its versioned definition to surface unintended changes before they cause incidents.

A defined rule that must be satisfied before a database change is permitted to proceed through a deployment pipeline.

A deployment operation that produces the same end state regardless of how many times it runs, enabling safe re-execution and recovery.

A versioned file that describes a database change in a repeatable, reviewable form — the atomic unit of managed schema evolution.

The consistent application of the same database changes across development, QA, staging, and production environments through automation.

The mandatory validation of a database change by another qualified engineer before it can be approved for deployment to production.

Automated validations that run against every proposed database change to enforce team standards and compliance requirements before deployment.

The coordinated planning, packaging, and delivery of database changes as part of application release cycles.

The process of reversing a database change to restore a previous known state — automated and versioned in modern governance frameworks.

The versioned application of structural changes to a database, executed through a controlled pipeline with rollback capability.

The system of record for a team's code and database change definitions — the canonical version against which drift is measured.

A deployment approach in which every change follows a defined path — proposed, reviewed, approved, executed, and logged — with no manual bypass.