FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Knowledge Base & FAQ

Everything you need to know about DBAnchor's positioning, architecture, safety guarantees, and ecosystem support.

1. What is DBAnchor?
DBAnchor is a lightweight, safe universal database developer-experience middleware and diagnostics toolkit for PostgreSQL. It sits between your Python application and PostgreSQL to diagnose database connectivity, migration conflicts, schema drift, and configuration problems while protecting production databases from accidental destructive operations.
2. Does DBAnchor replace PostgreSQL?
No. DBAnchor does not replace PostgreSQL, SQLAlchemy, or any cloud database provider (Supabase, Neon, Railway, AWS RDS, GCP Cloud SQL). It serves as a developer-experience middleware and diagnostic/control layer.
3. Does DBAnchor replace Alembic?
No. DBAnchor works alongside Alembic. It provides graph intelligence, multi-head detection, branch divergence analysis, dry-run SQL generation, and DDL safety gates around Alembic migrations.
4. Does DBAnchor use AI?
No. DBAnchor is 100% deterministic and offline. It does not send your schemas, errors, or queries to external AI/LLM APIs. Diagnostics rely entirely on SQL AST analysis, metadata reflection, and a deterministic local knowledge base.
5. Does DBAnchor send database credentials externally?
No. DBAnchor operates completely offline and follows a strict Zero Credential Leaks policy. Passwords, auth tokens, and connection secrets are automatically redacted across logs, terminal tables, JSON exports, and stack traces.
6. Which PostgreSQL providers are supported?
DBAnchor works with any PostgreSQL 12–17+ engine. It includes auto-detection and specific tuning recommendations for Supabase, Neon, Railway, AWS RDS, GCP Cloud SQL, and Docker.
7. Can DBAnchor detect schema drift?
Yes. The dbx schema diff command inspects your SQLAlchemy declarative models and compares them against live PostgreSQL tables, highlighting missing columns, extraneous tables, and data type discrepancies.
8. Can DBAnchor protect production migrations?
Yes. When running with APP_ENV=production, DBAnchor's AST safety gates intercept destructive DDL statements such as DROP COLUMN, DROP TABLE, TRUNCATE, and DROP SCHEMA, halting execution unless an explicit --force-destructive override is supplied.
9. Can DBAnchor run in CI/CD?
Yes. DBAnchor is built for CI/CD environments like GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. Commands like dbx doctor --json and dbx migration plan return strict process exit codes (0 for pass, 1 for failure, 2 for blocked DDL).
10. Does DBAnchor support async Python?
Yes. DBAnchor supports asynchronous Python sessions and connection pools using the asyncpg driver and SQLAlchemy's AsyncSession, making it ideal for FastAPI and Starlette microservices.
11. Is DBAnchor open source?
Yes. DBAnchor is fully open source under the permissive Apache License 2.0. You can review the source code, open issues, and contribute on GitHub.
12. What Python versions are supported?
DBAnchor officially supports Python 3.10, 3.11, 3.12, and 3.13 across Linux, macOS, and Windows.