Schema Design

This is a reference guide for Butterbase's declarative schema DSL, where you describe your desired database state and the platform diffs and applies the changes for you. You never write raw ALTER TABLE statements. The manage_schema tool gives you get, dry_run, apply, and list_migrations actions, all idempotent and transactional. The guide covers column types (with a strong warning to use timestamptz, not timestamp), foreign key syntax, the standard base pattern with uuid primary keys and timestamps, and index methods including hnsw for vector embeddings. It also walks through destructive operations, which require explicit _drop and _dropColumns flags. If you're building on Butterbase or need to understand its schema conventions quickly, this is the cheat sheet.