TL;DR: dbLinter has exited preview and is now fully available. Get a license to share configurations with your team and integrate it into pipelines via the CLI.

dbLinter: enforcing coding standards

If you haven't heard of dbLinter yet, I recommend reading my previous blog post, which describes what it does and how it works in detail. In summary, it scans your Oracle SQL and PL/SQL code for common good-practice violations, helping you write and deploy better code.

The product has been in preview for the past few months while we implemented the features from the 1.0 roadmap.

The rules

All 186 rules have now been implemented and are ready to be applied to your code. Of these, 36 rules run SQL queries against your database to validate data-related aspects, and 166 perform traditional static code checks. Yes, 16 rules do both. You can explore all rules on the APEX companion app at dblinter.app, filtering them by various categories. This includes profiles that categorize strictness levels, from 'Essential' (universally applicable rules) to 'Extreme' (more opinionated ones where violations might feel nitpicky).

Essential Plan

During the preview phase, you could only create a single configuration and not share it with your team. This is now possible with the Essential Plan.

Invite your teammates into your company's tenant, and define who is allowed to administer configurations. You can now also create multiple configurations, allowing dbLinter to fit into any project, regardless of its current maturity or standards. Especially for code bases where there were no strict coding requirements before, it can be practical to start with a new configuration enabling just a small number of rules. Then, resolve issues, add a few more checks, and gradually build up.

dbLinter also fits well into your company's DevOps pipelines. With the CLI, you can run checks after commits or on pull requests, for example. The CLI supports multiple formats like Checkstyle, GitHub, GitLab, Sarif, SonarQube, or plain Markdown. I will prepare a thorough guide on how to use the CLI, but here's a preview of how GitHub shows violations:

Additionally, the Essential Plan allows you to apply quick fixes, where the IDE extension (currently VS Code and IDEs that implement the Visual Studio Code Extension API, such as VSCodium, Cursor, Windsurf, Antigravity, and Theila IDE) can automatically fix the code if there is a safe way to do so.

If this sounds exciting, check out the pricing information on our product page.

Upcoming

Next, we are implementing the Professional Plan to integrate with SonarQube, import/export configurations, and even create custom rules that can be developed and tested in a dedicated environment.

Additionally, we will provide easy-to-use CI integration templates, like a GitHub Action template, to easily use dbLinter in your automations.

Because the dbLinter IDE extension is built on the language server protocol, it is possible to create extensions for other IDEs that support it. Please let us know if you want to see dbLinter support a different IDE.

We also got questions regarding an on-premises version. dbLinter is designed as a cloud solution. There are ways to make it work completely in your company network. However, this is currently not our main focus, especially since the code and data to be analysed do not leave the company’s network.

Try dbLinter for free

You can get started by installing the dbLinter VS Code extension (or use Open VSX for derivatives like Cursor) or create a free account on dblinter.app to create a free personal configuration to disable/enable or customize rules. Refer to this YouTube tutorial on configuring your dbLinter setup.

If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to reach out to us.