Database inspection is the process of connecting to a database to extract metadata about the way data is structured inside it. In this post, we will present some use cases for inspecting a database, demonstrate why it is a non-trivial problem to solve, and finally show how it can be solved using Atlas, an open-source package (and command-line tool) written in Go that we are maintaining at Ariga.
Last week we released v0.3.2 of the Atlas CLI.
Atlas is an open source tool that helps developers manage their database schemas. Atlas plans database
migrations for you based on your desired state. The two main commands are inspect and apply. The inspect command inspects your database
and the apply command runs a migration by providing an HCL document with your desired state.
The most notable change in this version is the ability to interact
with multiple schemas in both database inspection and migration (the apply command).
Earlier this week we released v0.3.0 of the Atlas CLI. This version features a ton of improvements to database inspection, diffing and migration planning. You can read about those in the release notes page, but we wanted to take the time and introduce the biggest feature in this release, the Atlas Management UI.
At Ariga, we are building a new kind of platform that we call an Operational Data Graph. This platform enables software engineers to manage, maintain and access complex data architectures as if they were one database. Today, we are open-sourcing a CLI for Atlas, one of the fundamental building blocks of our platform.