Auto-Generate Column Schema from Your Database

Overview

Goal - Automatically generate and maintain column metadata for your assets by pulling schema information directly from the destination database.

Audience - Data engineers who want to keep their asset metadata in sync with the actual database schema without manual updates.

Prerequisites

• Bruin CLI installed
• The Bruin VS Code or Cursor extension installed
• An asset that has been materialized in the destination database

Steps

1) Open the render panel

Open an asset in your editor and navigate to the Bruin render panel. Go to the Columns section.

2) Fill columns from the database

If you haven't defined any columns yet, click Fill from DB. Bruin will connect to your destination database, read the table schema, and populate the column names and data types automatically.

This saves you from manually looking up data types and typing out every column definition.

3) Update existing schema

If your asset already has columns defined but the table schema has changed (new columns added or removed), click Fill from DB again. It will add any new columns that are missing from your definition without overwriting existing ones.

4) Add descriptions

The fill-from-DB feature populates column names and data types but not descriptions. You can add descriptions manually or use an AI agent to generate them if it has enough context about your data.

5) Use the CLI alternative

You can also run this from the terminal:

bruin patch fill-columns-from-db path/to/asset.sql

Existing column metadata is preserved - only new columns are added. Column names are compared case-insensitively to prevent duplicates.

Key takeaways

• Fill from DB eliminates manual schema entry and keeps your metadata in sync
• It only adds new columns - existing metadata is preserved
• Use this alongside bruin ai enhance to generate descriptions automatically

Helpful links

• Patch command reference
• Video walkthrough