Design and scope

The contract

pista dump writes the schema of a database as SQL. When that output is fed back to plan as the desired schema, plan finds no changes. If it finds any, that is a bug.

A schema written in a form other than dump output may drift. Fixing such drift has lower priority. Known limitations lists these cases as Priority: low.

What is not managed

CREATE EXTENSION, CREATE ROLE and GRANT are out of scope. They belong to a different privilege layer than the schema. Manage them with the rest of the infrastructure, for example in Terraform.

pistachio reads only the statements that it manages. It skips every other statement and prints an ignored unsupported statement: warning for each one. For a statement that must still run, consider -- pista:execute.

Explicit directives

pistachio emits the DDL that a change needs, and nothing more. Extra statements cost the database time and locks. It also does not guess what the user wants. The user says it with a directive.

For example, pistachio does not detect a rename. A renamed table looks like a drop and an add, and a wrong guess would drop data. Mark the rename with -- pista:renamed-from.

Rare inputs

pistachio does not cover every rare input. Code for a rare case makes the rest harder to follow. Known limitations lists the open cases and what a fix would take.