db-engine-selection

db-engine-selection is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from Hainrixz/claude-db. It costs 107 tokens per session (1,092 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A database-selection skill that recommends a database type and engine for a described workload before detailed schema design begins.

In plain words
What is it for?
Choosing a database for a new system by evaluating access patterns, integrity needs, data shape, scale, operations, team experience, and platform limits.
Why use it?
It turns requirements such as query patterns, consistency, scale, and team constraints into a primary recommendation plus a runner-up and its trade-off.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the claude-db plugin — 36 skills, 6 agents, 1 hook shipped together

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/hainrixz/claude-db/db-engine-selection
Any agent
npx skills add Hainrixz/claude-db --skill db-engine-selection
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Hainrixz/claude-db

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install claude-db, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 36 skills, 6 agents, 1 hook.

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 db-engine-selection

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hainrixz/claude-db/db-engine-selection.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/hainrixz/claude-db/db-engine-selection)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/hainrixz/claude-db/db-engine-selection"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/hainrixz/claude-db/db-engine-selection.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 107 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,092 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 $0.00107 $0.01092
Opus 5 $0.00053 $0.00546
Sonnet 5 $0.00021 $0.00218
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00109

Measured 5d ago against content hash 18023cadb5fa, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

db-engine-selection 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 5d 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.

skills/db-engine-selection/SKILL.md · 62 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 62 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

db-engine-selection (M0) — recommend, don't score

M0 runs at design / /claude-db:start time, when there may be no schema yet — only a described workload. It answers "which database should this be?" It is not a scored module: it emits no findings, has no axis, no severity, and never enters score.mjs or either of the two scores. Its output is a separate recommendation contract (below). It walks the decision tree in references/engine-selection-tree.md.

Inputs it gathers

From the user's description (or detected stack via references/detection-signals.md):

  • Access patterns — point lookups by key, range scans, complex multi-entity joins, full-text / semantic search, time-ordered analytics, graph traversal, fan-out reads/writes.
  • Consistency & integrity needs — strong/transactional vs eventual; multi-row invariants; need for DB-enforced referential integrity.
  • Scale & shape — expected size, write rate, read/write ratio, cardinality, whether data is append-only/time-series, vector/embedding workloads.
  • Operability & team — managed vs self-hosted, serverless/edge, existing expertise, platform constraints (cross-checks db-platform-fit M21).

How it decides (tree summary; full tree in the reference)

  1. Relational by default for transactional, multi-entity, integrity-heavy workloads (Postgres as the safe default; MySQL/MariaDB where the ecosystem dictates).
  2. Document (Mongo/Firestore) when the data is aggregate-oriented, read by one access pattern, and embedding beats joining — and the team accepts app-enforced integrity.
  3. Key-value (Redis/DynamoDB) for known-key point access, caching, sessions, high-throughput simple ops.
  4. Wide-column (Cassandra/Scylla) for massive write-heavy, table-per-query, partition-first workloads.
  5. Vector (pgvector/Qdrant/etc.) for semantic search / RAG — often alongside a primary store, not instead of one.
  6. Time-series (Timescale/ClickHouse/Influx) for append-only metrics/events with time-range analytics.
  7. Graph (Neo4j) when traversal depth/relationship queries are the core workload, not an afterthought. Polyglot is a valid answer: name each store and its job. Prefer "Postgres + an extension" (pgvector, JSONB, partitioning, FTS) before adding a second engine, when one engine credibly covers the workload.

Read the full file on GitHub · 62 lines

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. 5d ago First seen · 62 lines · 107 tokens per session scan A 18023cadb5fa

Subscribe to this mod's changes

db-engine-selection is a skill published in the GitHub repository Hainrixz/claude-db (19 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 107 tokens to every session and 1,092 once invoked, about $0.0005 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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