Idempotent Migration - CI/CD Glossary Definition

An idempotent migration produces the same result whether it runs once or many times, typically by guarding statements with IF NOT EXISTS / IF EXISTS so a re-run is a no-op.

Why it matters in CI

CI and deploy pipelines can retry. An idempotent migration survives a partial failure or a duplicate run without erroring on "column already exists", which keeps retried jobs safe.

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