database-design

database-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills. It costs 20 tokens per session (443 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for designing SQL and NoSQL databases, including their tables or document structures, indexes, migrations, and queries.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to plan normalized schemas, choose indexes, write reversible migrations, and improve query performance.
Why use it?
It helps prevent duplicated data, slow lookups, unsafe schema changes, and queries that do not scale well.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to plan normalized schemas, choose indexes, write reversible migrations, and improve query performance.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/database-design
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.

Any agent
npx skills add cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills --skill database-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for database-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/database-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/database-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/database-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills/database-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 20 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 443 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
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 5.1 $0.00020 $0.00443
Opus 5 $0.00010 $0.00221
Sonnet 5 $0.00004 $0.00089
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00044

Measured 7d ago against content hash 673a6482dc90, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

database-design 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 7d ago.

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.

categories/backend/database-design/SKILL.md · 55 lines

What it actually says

Database Design

Design efficient, scalable database schemas.

Normalization

Normal Form Rule Violation Example
1NF Atomic columns, no repeating groups phone_numbers: "555-0100,555-0200"
2NF 1NF + all non-key cols depend on full PK Orders table with product details
3NF 2NF + no transitive dependencies Employee with department_name (dept info in dept table)

When to denormalize: Read-heavy workloads, reporting, caching layers.

Indexing Strategy

Index Types

Index Use Case Tradeoff
B-Tree General purpose, equality + range Default, usually best
Hash Equality only Fast lookups, no sorting
GIN Array/JSON Slightly slower writes
BRIN Huge sorted tables Very small size

Rules

  • Index columns used in WHERE, JOIN, ORDER BY
  • Index foreign keys
  • Covering indexes for frequent queries
  • Don't over-index (slows writes, uses space)
  • Drop unused indexes (use pg_stat_user_indexes)

Migrations

  • One file per change, sequential naming
  • Always reversible (up/down pair)
  • Test on staging before production
  • Run in transactions where possible
  • Avoid locking tables on large tables (use pt-online-schema-change)

Query Optimization

  • EXPLAIN ANALYZE every slow query
  • Look for: Seq scans, nested loops, temp files
  • Common fixes: missing index, bad join order, OR conditions
  • N+1 problem: batch find / includes / joins
  • Limit offsets for pagination (use cursor-based)
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. 7d ago First seen · 55 lines · 20 tokens per session scan A 673a6482dc90

Subscribe to this mod's changes

database-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository cosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent-skills (471 stars, last pushed 12d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 20 tokens to every session and 443 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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