Database administration support

[imajus]

I was wondering if the tool could allow to administrate the database instances.

My use case is that I have to manage multiple various database instances (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis), so I want to reduce the technical burden by relying on an AI assistant to execute my intents.

For example:

• Create/remove databases
• Create/remove users and manage access
• Backup/restore from the file system

Does this fit the project ideology? Anyone else interested in such functionality?

[bhaskarblur]

Hello @imajus
Thanks for raising your idea. This is something which can become a responsibility of NeoBase, though we didn't start the project with this ideology in mind.

I encourage your idea as this project has the vision to become Database Orchestrator, so this is something which will be required from us to achieve it.
Can you make an execution plan of your vision for this feature? Then we can discuss this over a call maybe to see how we can implement it. Please do include both Frontend User Experience & Backend Technical Side in it.

Looking forward for your response.

[imajus]

Sure! So my own use case is that I self-host a few FOSS products tha use different databases. Specifically, I currently host PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis & MongoDB and I need to administer them periodically.

In my case, the "administration" usually involves a limited set of operations:

• Manage databases: create/remove
• Manage users, roles, access credentials

Having had some SQL programming experience in the past, I could theoretically do all of this myself, but the problem is that each SQL database has a unique administration interface, and keeping track of these specifics is simply overwhelming, especially since it was not my choice to install and use all these databases. It gets worse when I have to switch between SQL and NoSQL administration interfaces, as they are very different.

What I think would be the best solution to my problem is a generic UI for performing these administration operations. Using chat as the UI is the best, because it will let me to use all these databases in an abstract way.
If I could just type "create database XXX and a user with the same name as the database owner" and it would just do that, I would call it a perfect solution to my problem.

I haven't thought about how to better implement this in the backend. The obvious way would be to create tools for the AI agent to utilise, separately for each database we need to support, which will support the administration operations.

Does this make sense?

[bhaskarblur]

Hi! @imajus
I understand the struggle you're going through of dealing with complex DB Admin interfaces that too requiring to learn navigation & ways to do stuff, problem comes is when you're dealing with different DBs like you mentioned, this is a big problem that NeoBase is solving & making DB management simpler.

We can implement your proposed idea, however, we would need to see at UI/User Perspective that how we will communicate to user that NeoBase supports such functionality and also further how will the user interact with such request. Whether it will be a button to do so somewhere in UI where user 1 clicks and things happen, or it will be totally chat based.

Good one, Are you interested in picking up this for implementation by yourself or would you require someone for this to work with you. If we go with Chat based approach, you may not need to touch frontend for this implementation, just some prompting needs to be modified in backend for each DB and rest NeoBase is already interacting with each DB and has capability to fulfill such requests.

Thanks

[imajus]

I may suggest to implement it the way it would work the best in my head:

1. Introduce a new toggle in the connection "Settings" tab to activate "Database Administration".

   

2. When the setting is activated, enable database administration actions like databases/users management via the chat UI.

I believe to implement that, you'll need to create appropriate tools for each database in the backend. The initial minimal set of such tools could be as follows:

1. UserCreate(username: string, password?: string)
2. UserDelete(username: string)
3. UserUpdateAccess(username: string, database: string, granted: boolean)
4. UserUpdatePassword(username: string, password: string)
5. DatabaseCreate(name: string)
6. DatabaseDelete(name: string)

Unfortunately, I don't see how can I help with that because I'm not experienced with the Go language.

[bhaskarblur]

Hi @imajus Thanks for your input.

I think the development needs to be carried out by someone else then since you're not familiar to Go, either me or someone else.
Please create a well defined issue for this with the screenshot as well as implementation plan you propose so that it can be assigned to me or someone else.

Thanks