Relations And Advanced Schema

Pack: drizzle-orm Parent skill: Drizzle ORM Schema and Relations Source: drizzle-orm/drizzle-orm-schema-and-relations/references/relations-and-advanced-schema.md

Read this when

• defining relations() or defineRelations()
• modeling foreign keys or many-to-many joins
• using views, sequences, RLS, or extension-backed column types

Relation guidance

• Start with actual foreign keys and normalized tables.
• Use Drizzle relations to make relational queries concise and typed.
• Keep relation definitions colocated with the tables they describe, or in a single aggregated relation module if the project prefers that.

Version-sensitive note

• The docs include both the older relational-query surface and the newer v2/beta relation flow.
• If a task references defineRelations or db._query, treat it as beta-line work and confirm the repo is on the compatible version track before migrating code.

Advanced schema surfaces

• indexes and constraints
• sequences
• views and materialized views
• row-level security
• extension-backed types like vector or PostGIS geometry
• custom type definitions

Footguns

• Soft relations help query ergonomics but do not replace DB constraints.
• Extension-backed tables may need explicit migration/config filters elsewhere in the stack.
• Relation migrations and query migrations should move together when adopting the v2/beta relation surface.

Source map

• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/relations-schema-declaration
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/relations
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/relations-v2
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/relations-v1-v2
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/views
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/sequences
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/rls
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/custom-types
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/extensions/pg