Backend Support

tonic currently supports Postgres, Snowflake, SQLite, MySQL, and DuckDB targets.

Connection Context

Backend	Execution context keys
Postgres	database, schema
Snowflake	database, schema, warehouse, role
SQLite	none
MySQL	database; schema aliases to database
DuckDB	database, schema

Inspect commands also accept public scope keys catalog and namespace where they map cleanly to backend concepts.

Inspect Matrix

Capability	Postgres	Snowflake	SQLite	MySQL	DuckDB
Catalogs	yes	yes	no	yes	yes
Namespaces	yes	yes	yes	no	yes
Tables	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Views	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
View definitions	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Columns	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
Catalog DDL	no	yes	no	no	no
Namespace DDL	no	yes	no	no	no
Table DDL	no	yes	yes	yes	yes
View DDL	no	yes	yes	yes	yes
Descriptions	limited	yes	limited	limited	limited

Snowflake descriptions come from native object comments. DuckDB descriptions come from comments exposed through DuckDB metadata functions. Other backends may return empty descriptions.

Object Name Normalization

Inspect object references are unquoted dot paths:

• name
• namespace.name
• catalog.namespace.name

Current backend normalization lowercases Postgres identifiers, uppercases Snowflake identifiers, and leaves SQLite/MySQL/DuckDB names as provided.

Snowflake Browser Auth Cache

Snowflake browserauth targets can opt into driver credential caching with browserauth_cache: true.

The shared snowflake.browserauth_cache_dir setting can direct the Snowflake driver cache directory. Commands under query, inspect, and serve re-exec once with SF_TEMPORARY_CREDENTIAL_CACHE_DIR set when needed.