Going further

Understand drift

Documentation that goes stale quietly is worse than none — people trust it right up until it burns them. Drift is ZestreaDB refusing to let that happen silently: when the database changes underneath a flow, it says so out loud.

1. A red health dot — "Database Drift (Orphaned Nodes)" — appears on the flow in the sidebar and dashboard.

   It means an object your flow references is no longer in the last imported schema — dropped, or left out of a narrower re-import (an import can’t tell "outside this extract" from "removed from the database"; re-import without the filter to clear it). A pure rename or a move to another schema does NOT drift — the object’s stable id carries your documentation across untouched. Recognition is a stable id, not how much the name changed.

2. Open the flow and select the flagged node; the inspector explains it: "Catalog link needs review".

3. Fix it by re-importing (if the object still exists under a new shape) or by removing the node (if it’s genuinely gone).

   Drift isn’t an error to suppress — it’s a prompt to reconcile the document with reality. A node truly detaches — its documentation stays on the old object and the node needs relinking — only when an object is renamed and moved schema at the same time, or when it changes type (a table replaced by a view). Both are rare and flagged.