Wow, how can you afford offering free AI on the homepage for an OSS project? I can barely afford AI APIs even for my own personal use. Seems like it would drive costs through the roof.
Maybe they value the training data?
Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
31–37 of 37 posts
Re: Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
#32My conversation "Design a schema like Calendly" --> Did it "OK let's scale this to 100m users" --> Tells me how it would. No schema change. "Did you update the schema?" --> Updates the schema, tells me what it did. We've been running into this EXACT failure mode with current models, and it's so irritating. Our agent plans migrations, so it's code-adjacent, but the output is a structured plan (basically: tasks, which…
I asked it to abstract a event-specific table to a GP "events" table which it did, but kept the specific table. I asked it to delete that table and it said it did, but did not. I got stuck in a loop asking it to remove the table that the LLM insisted was not part of the schema, but was present in the diagram.
It was easier to close the tab than fire a human, but other than that not a great experience.
Re: Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
#33In my experience most AI coding tools can work with databases, especially if you give it an MCP tool to connect to your (development) database. It will generate mermaid er-diagrams by reading from your database catalog, it will generate SQL to create tables, views, etc. It will generate queries, validate them and return data. It will optimize your query performance by running the query, running explain plan, looking…
I tried my prompt with Claude and with this tool. There is no discussion with this tool. It just generates (a pretty cool) diagram.
I'll probably stick with Claude for now.
A killer feature would be a discussion loop that slowly refines the model in plaintext before committing to a diagram.
Re: Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
#34"an open-source tool" --> https://github.com/chartdb/chartdb ( AGPL-3.0 license ) prompts: https://github.com/chartdb/chartdb/blob/c3c646bf7cbb1328f4b2...
At quick glance I already see several things in that prompt are completely incorrect. For example: MariaDB has natively supported sequences for quite some time; for decades all versions of MySQL/MariaDB support "bool" or "boolean" as an alias; the timestamp default value advice is wrong as any arbitrary expression can be used; etc. These are all easily testable in Docker containers. There's a concerning lack of atten…
I see no conflict between AGPL and SaaS: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12988
Re: Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
At quick glance I already see several things in that prompt are completely incorrect. For example: MariaDB has natively supported sequences for quite some time; for decades all versions of MySQL/MariaDB support "bool" or "boolean" as an alias; the timestamp default value advice is wrong as any arbitrary expression can be used; etc. These are all easily testable in Docker containers. There's a concerning lack of atten…
I see no conflict between AGPL and SaaS: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/12988
OP accepted a lot of third-party contributions without a CLA, and then built a paid SaaS; and as far as I can tell, they aren't offering the full source code for that paid SaaS to users. This would be a requirement to avoid infringing the copyright of the third party contributors.
When code is contributed to a FOSS project, and there's no CLA, the contribution is licensed by the third-party contributor under the same terms as the project, and furthermore the contributor retains copyright (assuming there's no CAA, which is stronger than a CLA).
So if you start an AGPL project and offer a paid SaaS, you need to do one of the following:
a) don't accept outside pull requests
b) accept outside pull requests with a CLA or CAA
c) provide the full source code to the paid SaaS to users, as per the terms of the AGPL
d) keep those pull requests in the AGPL repo but rewrite or remove them in the paid SaaS
Any other path opens you up to risk of copyright infringement lawsuits if your business is successful.
The OP eventually added a CLA, but had already accepted a lot of code contributions prior to that. So in their previous Show HN, I asked what path they took to resolve the AGPL hurdles, and they did not respond.
Re: Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
#36In my experience most AI coding tools can work with databases, especially if you give it an MCP tool to connect to your (development) database. It will generate mermaid er-diagrams by reading from your database catalog, it will generate SQL to create tables, views, etc. It will generate queries, validate them and return data. It will optimize your query performance by running the query, running explain plan, looking…
I tried my prompt with Claude and with this tool. There is no discussion with this tool. It just generates (a pretty cool) diagram. I'll probably stick with Claude for now. A killer feature would be a discussion loop that slowly refines the model in plaintext before committing to a diagram.
That's also just something you can include in the prompt in Claude, instruct claude to ask questions until it is completely clear about the database schema you need. See this video: https://youtu.be/i4Jfl1IW-_U?si=yXiFvanIjGgZjQRA&t=178
Re: Show HN: ChartDB Agent – Cursor for DB schema design
#37Nice thanks, I was finally able to design the schema for my dog turd tracker. The foreign key to the smells table was a great suggestion!