Ubuntu – Preventing ActiveRecord migration from making huge changes in db/structure.sql

When running this ActiveRecord migration on the test (not production) database, large changes in db/structure.sql appear. This is reproducible. The changes are:

• A small number of the expected changes based on the migration code (as desired).
• A large number of unexpected changes unrelated to the migration code (not desired). All these unexpected changes rearrange the order of the tables, views and materialized views that are not mentioned in the SQL code in the migration. These rearranged items are not associated (e.g., by dependencies) with the items in the SQL code in the migration.

What causes these large unrelated differences, and how to prevent them?

Could they be related to the mismatch between the postgresql versions on the production database server and on the machine where the migrations are executed on the test database?

These unrelated changes make git diff output much less useful. In this tiny minimal example below, just a few tables are rearranged. But in the real life migration code it changes the order of dozens of tables, views and matviews.

class FixCreateImmuneProductionQualityMetricsViewsWi < ActiveRecord::Migration[5.2]

  def up
    sql = <<~SQL
                  DROP VIEW master_foo;
                  DROP VIEW IF EXISTS bar1;
                  CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW bar1 AS
                  SELECT * FROM baz1
                  UNION ALL
                  SELECT * FROM baz2;
                  CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW master_foo AS
                  SELECT
                      *,
                      'bar1' AS bar_type
                  FROM
                      bar1
                  UNION ALL
                  ...
    SQL

    execute sql
  end

  def down
    sql = <<~SQL
                  DROP VIEW IF EXISTS master_foo;
                  DROP VIEW IF EXISTS bar1;
                  ...
    SQL

    execute sql
  end
end 

Hardware/software used:

Machine where migrations are executed:

MacBookPro, Apple M1 Max, macOS Sonoma 14.2.1
ruby 2.7.3p183 (2021-04-05 revision 6847ee089d) [arm64-darwin21]
15.3 psql (PostgreSQL) 15.3 (Homebrew)

Production database server:

psql (14.9 (Homebrew), server 13.3 (Ubuntu 13.3-1.pgdg20.04+1))