Data Model

Workspace

The entire Bytebase instance runs a single workspace. Most of the time, the Workspace concept is transparent to the user since there is only one per Bytebase instance. We mention here because it's a common concept among SaaS products, and in Bytebase, the term Workspace is interchangeable with Bytebase instance. We do NOT plan to support multiple workspaces in Bytebase in the foreseeable future. You can run multiple Bytebase instances to achieve the similar result.

User

User models after a subject performing the operation. Most of the time, user corresponds to a human being. Bytebase also has a special robot user named "Bytebase" (ID=1) which conducts automatic operations.

Internally, Bytebase uses term Principal instead of User because former is more accurate to describe both human user and robot user.

Role

See Roles and Permissions.

Environment

Environment models after various environments in the development pipeline such as test, staging, prod. Most of the time, there is a 1:1 mapping between Environment and the real environment.

Most of the time, Owners and DBAs work with the Environment.

Database Instance

Database Instance or simply Instance models after a single database instance which is usually accessed via a host:port address. A typical database instance could be your on-premises MySQL instance, an AWS RDS instance etc. Each Database Instance belongs to an Environment

Most of the time, Owners and DBAs work with the Database Instance.

Database

Database refers to a single database from a Database Instance. A database is the one created by 'CREATE DATABASE xxx'. A database always belongs to a single Project.

Most of the time, Developers and DBAs work with the Database.

Project

Project is a logic unit to model a team effort. It's similar to the project concept in other dev tools such as Jira, GitLab. Project is the container to group logically related Databases, Issues and Users together. In Bytebase, A Database or an Issue always belongs to a single Project. Project is also the peering entity with the VCS repository to setup GitOps workflow.

Most of the time, Developers work with the Project.

Issue

Issue represents a specific collaboration activity between Developer and DBA such as creating a database, altering a schema. It's similar to the issue concept in other issue management tools.

In Bytebase, Issue is optimized for database domain. An Issue always belongs to a Project. A single Issue is only dealing with a particular Database Instance (e.g. creating a database on a database instance). Except for creating database issue, most other issues are also associated with an existing Database (e.g. altering a table on a database).

Internally, the issue progression is represented by a Pipeline. A Pipeline contains multiple Stages, each usually corresponds to an Environment. A Stage contains multiple Tasks dealing with a specific database operation such as altering table. A single Task can run multiple times (e.g. failed first and then retry). Each run is represented by a Task Run.

Sheet

Sheet is the entity where users store, run and share the SQL scripts. A paritcular sheet belongs to a project and may or may not attach a database context. Users interacts with the Sheet from SQL Editor.