Is it safe to do a data migration as just one operation in a larger Django migration?

I am handling what I assume is a common issue: I've realized that an existing model field of the model Foo would be better as a completely seperate model Bar with a foreign key to Foo. So, we need to make a schema migration. But what's more, since there is already existing data in the model field of Foo, we need to make a data migration before we delete that field. So we have identified that there are three distinct steps to take: Create the new table Bar Migrate the existing data in Foo to the new table Bar Delete the existing field in Foo First, I make all the needed model changes in models.py, and then auto-generate a migration. Everything looks good, except we're going to lose all the data in the field, so I need to add one extra operation to handle the data migration (RunPython). I would end up with something like the following: def do_data_migration(apps, schema_editor): # Migrate data from Foo to Bar class Migration(migrations.Migration): dependencies = [ ('exampleapp', 'migration_003'), ] operations = [ migrations.CreateModel( # Create the new model Bar ), migrations.AddField( # Add the foreign key field to model Foo ), migrations.RunPython( do_data_migration ), migrations.RemoveField( # Remove the old field from Foo ), ] Is it safe to run a data migration as one of several operations in a migration? My worries are that there is any sort of locking going on, or if perhaps the app registry that RunPython passes to do_data_migration won't be up to date with the preceding operations? I am aware the I could create three migrations: one for CreateModel and AddField, the second for RunPython, and the last for RemoveField. The question is if it is functionally equivalent to do all four steps in a single migration (which provides the added benefit of making the entire migration easier to understand.)