SQLDoc: generate database schema documentation

Despite the many programming languages and frameworks I have used, I think Ruby on Rails really nailed it for their database integrations. Specifically, I find it incredibly helpful in development loop to find out the database schema from within my editor by fuzzy-searching db/schema.rb. One step further to that is annotation on the models file, using something like drwl/annotaterb.

I miss that feature when I’m developing something not-Rails. The majority of time I spent programming these days are in Go, which is usually paired with sqlc and golang-migrate.

In early projects, migrations are still simple that CREATE TABLE declarations is close enough with current state. It becomes harder with every ALTER TABLE statements, though.

In small projects, sqlc’s generated structs within models.go would be sufficient. However, it’s still difficult to find something beyond field types, such as default values and constraints.

So I did something about it: I wrote a documentation generator called SQLDoc. It’s very early! Like, I hacked it over 2-3 hours kind of “early”.

I plan to continue working on this project. It’s useful to fix my immediate needs, but I would love to have it be as informative, if not more, than psql -c '\d+ table_name'.

Please check it out and let me know what you think!