Flyway or the highway!
Flyway is a great tool to manage the consistency of your database in Java-land. For each change in the database schema that is needed to run your application consistently with the db, you place a sql file in the db.migration folder. This allows flyway to manage the migration. Flyway checks if the sql files are already executed (using a hash table in the target database), else it will run the neccessary sql script(s). There is however a little setup required, even within a Spring Boot application. You can use the maven flyway plugin to run flyway migrations with mvn over CLI. This would mean decoupling a major part of your database's consistency management from your application into a build script... Though the only thing a Spring Boot application actually needs, is the flyway-core dependency ( which is recommended by Spring ). Keeping the management within the application. Probably the right choice since in this case the db only exists by the authority of that application....