dblint

dblint examines a relational database and makes suggestions to improve structure.

dblint's suggestions come from my experience as a relational database user and DBA.

At the moment, more is unimplemented than implemented, but it is a short example of the kinds of problems Prolog is good at solving.

Example Session

The sample database's structure is in basic.sql and looks something like this:

CREATE TABLE managers (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY);

CREATE TABLE users (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  name VARCHAR UNIQUE,
  manager_id INTEGER
);

CREATE TABLE projects (
  id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY,
  user_id INTEGER REFERENCES users,
  tag1 VARCHAR,
  tag2 VARCHAR,
  tag3 VARCHAR,
  access1 VARCHAR,
  access2 VARCHAR
);

This is an example suggestion session:

$ swilgt
?- [loader].
true.

?- main::run_on_file('basic.sql').
Missing foreign key from projects (user_id) to users

  [alter,table,projects,add,constraint,projects_users_fk,foreign,key, (,user_id,),references,users, (,id,),;]
  
Missing foreign key from users (manager_id) to managers

  [alter,table,users,add,constraint,users_managers_fk,foreign,key, (,manager_id,),references,managers, (,id,),;]
  
Unindexed foreign key on projects (user_id)

  [create,index,on,projects, (,user_id,)]
  
Repeating group on projects with name access

  [begin,;,create,table,projects_accesses, (,),;,;,;,commit,;]
  
Repeating group on projects with name tag

  [begin,;,create,table,projects_tags, (,),;,;,;,commit,;]
  
Unnecessary surrogate key on users (use name instead)

  [alter,table,users,drop,column,id,,,add,primary,key, (,name,),;]

true.

So you can see that dblint correctly identified several types of problems, including repeating groups, a redundant surrogate key, an unindexed foreign key and a column that probably is a foreign key but lacks the constraint, and it even attempted to output SQL to correct it.

Future

My goal is to improve dblints suggestions. I don't mind staying relatively PostgreSQL specific, at least in terms of advice; I would like to be able to parse MySQL and others SQL even if I'm assuming that PostgreSQL is the actual target. I would like to ensure that the generated SQL takes into account earlier suggestions and can be configured to display particular categories of suggestion, such as style, normalization, etc.