no-drop-table

Reports a dropped table, which deletes all of its rows and breaks application code that still uses it.

Category	Default severity	Databases
data-loss	error	PostgreSQL, MySQL

What happens

DROP TABLE removes the table definition and all of its data when the migration commits. On MySQL, DDL statements commit on their own, so a DROP TABLE cannot be rolled back even when a later statement in the migration fails.

Instances still running the previous version of the application fail on every query to the table until they are replaced.

Bad

import { MigrationInterface, QueryRunner } from 'typeorm'

export class RemoveAuditLog1727200000000 implements MigrationInterface {
  public async up(queryRunner: QueryRunner): Promise<void> {
    await queryRunner.query(`DROP TABLE "audit_log"`)
  }

  public async down(queryRunner: QueryRunner): Promise<void> {
    // ...
  }
}

Safe

Remove the entity and every use of it first, and deploy that. Drop the table in a later release, after you have archived any data you need:

import { MigrationInterface, QueryRunner } from 'typeorm'

export class DropAuditLog1727300000000 implements MigrationInterface {
  public async up(queryRunner: QueryRunner): Promise<void> {
    // preflight safety-assured no-drop-table -- entity removed in 2.3, rows archived to S3 on 2026-09-01
    await queryRunner.query(`DROP TABLE "audit_log"`)
  }

  public async down(queryRunner: QueryRunner): Promise<void> {
    // ...
  }
}

When to suppress

In the second step of the pattern above, or for a table that only ever held temporary data.

References

• PostgreSQL: DROP TABLE
• MySQL: DROP TABLE ("Be careful with this statement! For each table, it removes the table definition and all table data.") and statements that cause an implicit commit