Posting for posterity.
I realize this is unsupported now, and I'm not sure if it was 1.5 years ago when I installed ITFlow. But my setup uses MySQL provided by Ubuntu. I found that the latest DB update from 1.7.8->1.7.9 causes a syntax error for MySQL. Specifically, it's the "DROP COLUMN IF EXISTS" syntax. The "IF EXISTS" option is supported for "DROP COLUMN" in MariaDB, but not MySQL.
As a workaround, I temporarily modified the update script to simply use "DROP COLUMN" instead since the "IF EXIST" part isn't supported. This completed without error. Assets accept edits and no issues are seen at this time.