This issue is detectable, at least, to prevent cascading issues (it probably requires manual intervention to resolve though): You have a started and finished c

This issue is detectable, at least, to prevent cascading issues (it probably requires manual intervention to resolve though): You have a started and finished columns and/or a state column on your migrations table; Insert into migrations; Run migration foo; Update migrations set finished = now, state = finished where migration = foo; Then your deploy tool refuses to run (and reports an error) when there are any non-finished migrations found. Honestly if your migrations need `if not exist` regularly for basic stuff like creating tables or whatnot something is wrong - it implies you can't rely on other migrations having been performed at which point you have no reasonable way to expect that the end result will be correct.