Schema Design

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

Read this when

• declaring or reorganizing Drizzle schema files
• choosing between aliases and casing
• editing tables, enums, schemas, views, or constraints

Core schema rules from the docs

• Drizzle schema is the source of truth for future queries and migrations.
• You can keep schema in a single file or spread it across multiple files, but exported models must stay discoverable for Drizzle Kit.
• Table declarations are dialect-specific. There is no one shared table object across PostgreSQL, MySQL, and SQLite.
• TypeScript keys become SQL identifiers unless you provide explicit column names or use DB-level casing during Drizzle initialization.

Durable patterns

• Keep schema under a predictable src/db or equivalent folder so both app code and Drizzle Kit point at the same place.
• Use explicit aliases when only a few columns need DB names that differ from TypeScript names.
• Use casing: 'snake_case' or the project’s preferred convention when the whole schema follows a consistent mapping.
• Reuse shared column fragments intentionally for repeated timestamp or audit fields.

Important footguns

• If a model is not exported, Drizzle Kit cannot include it in migration diffing.
• MySQL schemas/databases can be expressed in Drizzle queries, but Drizzle Kit does not manage them in the migration flow.
• SQLite has no schema namespace concept, so keep everything in the single DB-file context.

Source map

• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/sql-schema-declaration
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/schemas
• https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/indexes-constraints