qail

Schema-first database toolkit — Pull, diff, migrate, validate.

[!CAUTION] Alpha Software: QAIL is currently in alpha. While we strive for stability, the API is evolving to ensure it remains ergonomic and truly AST-native. Do not use in production environments yet.

Installation

cargo install qail

Commands

Schema Operations

# Extract schema from database
qail pull postgres://user:pass@host/db -o schema.qail

# Compare two schemas
qail diff old.qail new.qail

# Check best practices
qail lint schema.qail

# Format QAIL files
qail fmt schema.qail

Migration Operations

# Create a new migration
qail migrate create add_users_table --author "dev"

# Preview migration SQL
qail migrate plan old.qail:new.qail

# Apply migrations
qail migrate up old.qail:new.qail postgres://...

# Rollback migrations
qail migrate down postgres://...

Query REPL

# Interactive query transpiler
qail repl

> get users fields id, name where active = true
SELECT id, name FROM users WHERE active = true

Schema Format

QAIL uses a concise, version-controlled schema format:

-- schema.qail
table users (
    id uuid primary key default gen_random_uuid(),
    email text not null unique,
    created_at timestamptz default now()
);

table orders (
    id uuid primary key,
    user_id uuid references users(id),
    total numeric(10,2)
);

Features

• Schema extraction — Pull live schemas from PostgreSQL
• Smart diffing — Detect additions, removals, modifications
• Impact analysis — Warn about breaking changes
• Foreign key validation — Ensure referential integrity
• Data-safe migrations — Preview SQL before applying
• Type-safe queries — Transpile QAIL to SQL

Ecosystem

License

MIT

🤝 Contributing & Support

We welcome issue reports on GitHub! Please provide detailed descriptions to help us reproduce and fix the problem. We aim to address critical issues within 1-5 business days.