@Frank - Can you not handle exceptions in the application and display an error message (e.g. 404 NOT FOUND)?
I am in progress of rolling out support for Flyway (at least a feature branch for review), as mentioned in Managing Database Migrations
With this, there will be .sql files in WebAPI that applications will need to add their respective DDL to. For example, I will add the spring batch tables to V1.0.0__spring-batch-ddl.sql. Another example would be V1.0.0__heracles-ddl.sql.
Then upon initial startup, Flyway will determine that the DB has not yet been versioned, and will create the schema_version table and then apply the V1.0.0__* scripts.
It will take some discipline to ensure we add all database change in this way, but that is what I thought the direction was (i.e. to defer this sort of DB checking to our migration management library). I think we should look at showing error messages in the client…