explore

A read-only guide for exploring an unfamiliar database structure before writing SQL queries. It helps discover tables, columns, relationships, and small sample sets progressively.

In plain words
What is it for?
Finding relevant database objects, checking columns and keys before joins, and safely sampling or summarizing data.
Why use it?
It reduces errors caused by guessing table or column names and limits unnecessary data retrieval while learning the schema.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/bytebase/dbhub/explore
Any agent
npx skills add bytebase/dbhub --skill explore
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/bytebase/dbhub

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 289 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00024 $0.00289
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.00144
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00058
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00029

Measured yesterday against content hash 087e361d1bc0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

explore scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugin/skills/explore/SKILL.md · 20 lines

What it actually says

DBHub Schema Exploration

Use search_objects with progressive disclosure — always coarse to fine:

  1. Orient: object_type: "table", detail_level: "names" (pattern defaults to %, matching all). Cheap even on large schemas.
  2. Narrow: detail_level: "summary" for the tables that matter (row/column counts, comments), using a pattern like %order% rather than listing everything.
  3. Drill in: detail_level: "full" only for the tables you will actually query (complete columns, types, keys) — never as a first, pattern-less call on an unfamiliar schema.

Searching object_type: "column" with a pattern like %email% is the fastest way to find which tables hold a concept.

Querying

  • Always add LIMIT (or TOP on SQL Server) when sampling data — start with LIMIT 10. Prefer aggregates (COUNT, GROUP BY) over pulling rows to characterize data.
  • Check a table's full detail before writing JOINs so you use real column names — don't guess and retry.
  • This plugin is read-only; if a write is rejected, tell the user rather than trying to work around it.
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 20 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A 087e361d1bc0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

explore is a skill published in the GitHub repository bytebase/dbhub (3,431 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 289 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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