OpenSearch Provider

August 27, 2026 · View on GitHub

OpenSearch support for LibreDB Studio, built on the SQL plugin that ships with the distribution (POST /_plugins/_sql, port 9200) with no driver dependency of any kind: every statement is a JSON body and the answer comes back through the runtime's own fetch. This document is the single reference point for the opensearch type-id: design, architecture, usage, and tests. Its sibling elasticsearch.md is the prime reference for the upstream product — one implementation serves both type-ids, and the two documents deliberately disagree wherever the two products do.

StatusImplemented & shipped
Database type idopensearch
FamilySQL (src/lib/db/providers/sql/search/ — shared with elasticsearch)
DriverNone — HTTP only (fetch, a runtime built-in)
Query languagesql (the OpenSearch SQL plugin, bundled with the distribution — no install step). There is no ES|QL here at all, which is why SQL is the shared language (§3.3)
Default port9200 for both schemes. A TLS deployment serves HTTPS on that same port (§4.3). The container fixture publishes it on 9201 to avoid colliding with the upstream service
Connection poolingNone — each statement is one stateless HTTP request
Connection stringNot supported — addressed by host and port like Druid, and http(s):// is already ClickHouse's in the shared parser (§4.2)
EXPLAINNone. supportsExplain: false and no explainFormat. EXPLAIN <select> as a statement is refused here; a plan exists only behind a second endpoint this seam does not carry (§3.10)
WritesNone reach documents. DELETE is in this grammar but off by default, and every other mutation is refused outright (§5.6)
TransactionsNot exposed (the engine has none)
MaintenanceNone — nothing in MaintenanceType has a SQL-reachable analogue (§8)
Query cancellationNo cancelQuery. An abort closes this client's socket; the cluster keeps working (§3.8)
Verified againstOpenSearch 3.8.0, image opensearchproject/opensearch:3.8.0 (security disabled, stock single node — GET / reported distribution opensearch, number 3.8.0, build_date 2026-08-01), software licence Apache-2.0 (the image ships the Apache License, Version 2.0 as /usr/share/opensearch/LICENSE.txt) with no subscription tier to confuse it with, indices probe_orders (1 doc) and probe_shapes (2 docs, an object, a nested and a multi-field), measured 2026-08-19
Sourcesrc/lib/db/providers/sql/search/
Teststests/integration/db/opensearch-provider.test.ts + tests/unit/db/search/
Tracking issue#424 — Search providers, Phase 1

1. Overview

OpenSearch is the Apache-2.0 fork of Elasticsearch 7.10. Its SQL surface is a bundled pluginPOST /_plugins/_sql, present on a stock node with nothing to install and no tier gate — and that endpoint is the whole query surface this provider speaks. Schema and monitoring come from the REST APIs instead (_cat/indices, <index>/_mapping, _cluster/health, _cluster/stats), because the mapping is the index's own declaration while a SELECT only ever describes a statement (§6).

The fork shares the upstream product's REST layer and has replaced its SQL engine, and that split is the single most important thing to know about this provider: the same cluster speaks two error vocabularies depending on which endpoint answered (§3.6). Three things are OpenSearch-shaped:

  1. The success envelope is its own, schema / datarows with total and size beside it, and the user's alias lives in a separate member from the column name — so reading name alone puts the wrong label on a column (§3.4).
  2. The SQL plugin names its faults with Java class namesSQLFeatureNotSupportedException, SemanticCheckException, EOFParserException — while the core REST layer keeps the upstream snake_case lineage (§3.6).
  3. A stock node is mostly not your data. Measured on an empty 3.8.0 cluster, .plugins-ml-config and top_queries-2026.08.18-74305 are already there — and the second carries no leading dot, so the dot convention alone does not catch it (§6).

Concept mapping

DatabaseProvider slotOpenSearch realisationMechanism
"Table" (TableSchema)An index, displayed by its bare nameGET /_cat/indices?format=json&bytes=b
"Row"A documentOne positional array element in datarows
ColumnsThe index's mapped fields, flattened to dotted paths, mapping types verbatimGET /<index>/_mapping
Primary keynone — nothing a mapping declares is unique. _id is selectable here (measured, unlike upstream) but it is metadata rather than a mapped fieldisPrimary: false on every column
query(sql)One SQL statement, no parametersPOST /_plugins/_sql
Indexesnone — every mapped field is inverted-indexed with no index object to namealways []
Foreign keysnone (the engine has no such constraint)always [], plus declaresForeignKeys: false
getOverview() / storageVersion, cluster health, index count, cluster store bytes/, _cluster/health, _cluster/stats, _cat/indices
getActiveSessions()nothing — a request is one HTTP request, there is no sessionalways []
getSlowQueries()nothing read, although this product really does keep top-N queries — see §7always []
Maintenancenothing SQL can reachrunMaintenance() throws with the reason

2. Architecture

2.1 Where it sits

One directory serves two type-ids. Everything the two products disagree about on the wire is a row in the transport's dialect table (http-transport.ts:357-409) and everything they disagree about above it is one field of SearchProduct (index.ts:211):

src/lib/db/providers/sql/
├── sql-base.ts
├── clickhouse/
├── druid/
└── search/
    ├── index.ts             # SearchProvider (abstract) + ElasticsearchProvider + OpenSearchProvider
    ├── transport.ts         # SearchTransport interface + neutral result/error types (no I/O)
    ├── http-transport.ts    # the one implementation: both SQL endpoints, both envelopes
    └── introspect.ts        # mapping-driven schema (no SQL at all)

They stay two type-ids rather than one with a runtime probe because a connection has to say which product is listening: the SQL endpoint path is product-specific and the wrong one never reaches a SQL engine (measured — POST /_sql against OpenSearch answers HTTP 405, {"error":"Incorrect HTTP method for uri [/_sql?format=json] …"}). Their grammars also genuinely disagree — OFFSET, string escapes, #, […], backticks — which is recorded in src/lib/types.ts where the union is declared.

2.2 Class hierarchy

DatabaseProvider (interface, types.ts)
        ^
BaseDatabaseProvider (abstract, base-provider.ts)
        ^
SQLBaseProvider (abstract, sql-base.ts)
        ^
SearchProvider (abstract, search/index.ts:367)   <- not exported
        ^
OpenSearchProvider (search/index.ts:967)         ElasticsearchProvider (search/index.ts:953)

OpenSearchProvider is thin by construction — it names its product and nothing else (index.ts:959-971) — and the one behaviour it does not share with upstream is that its grammar accepts OFFSET, which is declared as a trait (acceptsOffsetClause: true) rather than branched on (§5.5).

2.3 What SQLBaseProvider gives for free

MemberPurpose here
buildLimitClause()Both forms are correct here: LIMIT n and LIMIT n OFFSET m (measured, HTTP 200). So the shared limiter is right unmodified and prepareQuery() never refuses anything on this product (§5.5)
prepareQuery() (base)The shared query limiter, used as inherited
escapeIdentifier()Inherited and never called — this provider builds no SQL of its own, because the schema comes from the mapping rather than from a statement. Worth knowing that its default branch would double-quote, which is wrong for this product (§5.4); the codebase's own quoter gets it right instead (identifier.ts:36)
getPlaceholder()Inherited and never reached: positional parameters are refused outright (§3.11)
measureExecution() / trackQuery()The measured duration is the only timing in existence — neither the body nor the headers carry one
shouldEnableSSL()Inherited but never called. TLS comes from the connection's own ssl config only (§4.3)

2.4 Registration & lifecycle

The factory wires the type-id in via a dynamic import (factory.ts:123):

case "opensearch": {
  const { OpenSearchProvider } = await import("./providers/sql/search/index");
  return new OpenSearchProvider(connection, options);
}

connect() (index.ts:536) proves the cluster with one SELECT 1 — measured HTTP 200, one column named 1 of type integer. It needs no index, so it also succeeds on a cluster holding nothing yet. It proves the product as well as the port: pointing an opensearch connection at an upstream node fails at the connection form, because POST /_plugins/_sql there is refused with {"error":"no handler found for uri [/_plugins/_sql] and method [POST]"} before it reaches any SQL engine, and the transport reports that as unreachable quoting the cluster's own words (§3.7).

disconnect() forgets the transport and nothing else: every request is one fetch with no pool, no session and no cursor behind it, which is why SearchTransport has no close() at all. API routes use getOrCreateProvider(), which caches the connected provider per connection.id and evicts it after 30 minutes idle.


3. Design decisions

These are the non-obvious choices. Read this section before changing the provider.

3.1 HTTP only — no driver, and what that costs

OpenSearch ships @opensearch-project/opensearch, a first-class Node client. It is not a dependency here: everything this provider needs is four REST paths and one SQL endpoint, so package.json is untouched — no install step to fail, no native module in the Docker image or any distribution channel, and no N-API question for the Bun runtime. Same rubric (docs/ADDING_A_PROVIDER.md), same call Couchbase (#262), ClickHouse (#264) and Druid (#265) made.

What it costs: no sniffing, no failover and no retry (one statement is one fetch to one host); the whole body is buffered before it is parsed, so a deliberately huge result is expensive in a way a streaming client would not be; and ssl.caCert / ssl.clientCert / ssl.rejectUnauthorized are not honoured, because global fetch cannot carry a custom CA without an undici Agent and undici is not a dependency (§4.3).

3.2 The transport seam: one interface, one implementation, two dialects

Provider logic never calls fetch. It goes through SearchTransport (transport.ts:230) — five calls, each answering one question:

interface SearchTransport {
  readonly dialect: SearchDialectId;                                  // "elasticsearch" | "opensearch"
  query(sql: string, signal?: AbortSignal): Promise<SearchQueryResult>;
  version(signal?: AbortSignal): Promise<{ version: string; product: string }>;
  indices(signal?: AbortSignal): Promise<SearchIndexInfo[]>;
  mapping(index: string, signal?: AbortSignal): Promise<SearchMappingField[]>;
  health(signal?: AbortSignal): Promise<SearchClusterHealth>;
}

dialect is the only product distinction that crosses it, and transport.ts:46-55 is explicit that it may pick a word and never a behaviour. http-transport.ts holds itself to the stronger rule that no method branches on this.dialect at all — it reads this.spec, one row of the dialect table — so the whole product difference is data:

dialect fieldopensearchelasticsearch
sqlPath / sqlQuery/_plugins/_sql, no query string (its default jdbc format is this envelope)/_sql, format=json (without it the answer is tabular text with no types)
columnsKey / rowsKeyschema / datarowscolumns / rows
aliasKeyaliasnull — the alias is folded into name
totalKeytotalnull — no count is sent at all
detailKeydetails — the only member with anything specific in itnull
faultsJava class names, plus one snake_case name from the core REST layersnake_case exception types
syntaxTypePattern/ParserException$/null

Seam rule. The wire vocabulary — the two SQL endpoints, /_cat/indices, /_cluster/health, /_cluster/stats, /_mapping, the envelope keys (schema, datarows, total, size, alias, columns, rows, cursor, properties, fields, mappings, docs.count, pri.store.size, cluster_name, size_in_bytes, details, root_cause), the product fault names, the HTTP status numbers and fetch itself — must appear only in http-transport.ts. tests/unit/db/search/seam-guard.test.ts parses every source in the directory with the TypeScript compiler API — not a grep — and fails the build the moment any of it appears elsewhere. This fork forces the guard to be narrower than Couchbase's or Druid's, because its envelope keys are ordinary English that the neutral seam legitimately uses: schema and size are simultaneously wire keys here and options.schema / TableSchema.size everywhere else, so those words are matched only as exact string literals — the spelling envelope parsing produces — and a bare property access is left alone.

Adopting @opensearch-project/opensearch later is one new file implementing the same interface.

3.3 SQL, because there is no ES|QL here

The upstream product has ES|QL (POST /_query); this one has none at all — the path answers 405. A surface only one of the two products has cannot be the shared query language, while the SQL endpoint is present on both with no tier gate, so queryLanguage is sql on both type-ids. That also buys Monaco SQL highlighting, the shared limiter, the "sql" tab type and saved queries with no additional code.

3.4 The success envelope: schema/datarows, a separate alias, and a count

Measured, SELECT customer AS who FROM probe_orders:

{"schema":[{"name":"customer","alias":"who","type":"keyword"}],
 "datarows":[["acme"]],
 "total":1,"size":1,"status":200}

Four properties the code depends on:

  • The alias is a separate member. Upstream declares {"name":"who"} for the same statement — the alias is the name there — so reading name alone would label this column customer, which is a wrong label rather than a missing one. describeColumns() (http-transport.ts:509) prefers the alias when the dialect declares an aliasKey, and the alias is what the user typed, so it is what the grid must show.
  • Rows are positional, so each row is rebuilt against the declared column list rather than read as an object; the declared order is authoritative in a way object keys never are.
  • A duplicate output name is REFUSED, not disambiguated. Measured, SELECT 1 AS c, 2 AS c answers HTTP 400, IllegalArgumentException, "Multiple entries with same key: c=2 and c=1" — where upstream answers 200 with two columns named c. So the seam's uniqueness invariant is load-bearing on exactly one of the two products, and disambiguate() (http-transport.ts:489) can never fire here. That is a fact about this engine, not dead code.
  • total and size accompany every answer, so SearchQueryResult.totalHits is a real number here and null upstream. It is deliberately not used by the provider (§5.2).

status inside the body is ignored. It duplicates the HTTP status, and the HTTP status is not what classifies a failure here either (§3.6).

3.5 Paging: the cursor is followed, never requested

Both products spell the paging token cursor, and the transport follows it until the engine stops sending one, bounded by MAX_PAGES = 1000 (http-transport.ts:151). The measurement that made this necessary came from upstream — an aggregation over 1500 distinct values answered 1000 rows plus a cursor with no page size ever requested, and page two carried no column declaration — so the loop carries page one's declaration forward and rebuilds later pages against it (elasticsearch.md §3.5).

The code is dialect-neutral and applies here unchanged: nothing about it asks which product answered, so a paged answer from this engine is followed the same way. No fetch_size is ever sent, so no server-side page state is created on this provider's initiative; a cursor still held when the ceiling is reached is closed on the way out before the ceiling is reported rather than silently accepted.

3.6 Two fault vocabularies in one cluster

This is the finding most likely to be mistaken for a bug in the provider. The SQL plugin reports Java class names while the core REST layer keeps the upstream snake_case lineage, so which vocabulary you see depends on which endpoint answered. Measured, one probe per row:

requestHTTPerror.typecategory
SELECT * FROM nope_missing404IndexNotFoundExceptionunknown-object
GET /nope_missing/_mapping404index_not_found_exception (snake_case!)unknown-object
SELECT nosuchfield FROM probe_orders400SemanticCheckException — "can't resolve Symbol(namespace=FIELD_NAME, name=nosuchfield) in type env"unknown-object
SELEKT 1 / INSERT INTO … / DELETE FROM probe_orders WHERE id = 99400SQLFeatureNotSupportedException — "Query must start with SELECT, DELETE, SHOW or DESCRIBE: …"unsupported
SELECT FROM probe_orders400ParserExceptionsyntax
SELECT * FROM probe_orders WHERE400EOFParserException — details "EOF"syntax
SELECT customer FROM probe_orders LIMIT abc400NumberFormatException — "For input string: "abc""syntax
SELECT 1 AS c, 2 AS c400IllegalArgumentExceptionengine
SELECT sillyfunc(1)400NullPointerException (a genuine engine-side NPE inside the parser)engine

Three consequences, all deliberate:

  • A missing index is 404 here and 400 upstream — the same typo, two statuses — while a user's own arithmetic answers 500 upstream. So categorisation is body-driven everywhere in this provider (transport.ts:26-32), the ClickHouse lesson from #264 arriving again.
  • A mistyped leading keyword is unsupported here and syntax upstream, because that is what each engine claims about it. The asymmetry is not papered over: unsupported is mapped to QueryError rather than to a configuration error for exactly this reason — it describes a statement problem, not a deployment one (§10).
  • ParserException is matched by SHAPE, not by name (syntaxTypePattern: /ParserException$/, http-transport.ts:408). Two members of that family were measured and the grammar has several, so matching the suffix means a third is classified correctly the first time a user hits it rather than reported as an engine fault. Anything the table has never seen becomes engine — "reached, understood, and refused" — rather than a guess.

The useful text is in details, not in reason. Measured, reason is the literal constant "Invalid SQL query" for a mistyped keyword, an unknown column and an unparseable LIMIT alike, while details holds the sentence that names the fault. So faultMessage() (http-transport.ts:600) prefers details here and falls back to reason, and it strips one trailing sentence:

{"error":{"reason":"Error occurred in OpenSearch engine: no such index [nope_missing]",
          "details":"[nope_missing] IndexNotFoundException[no such index [nope_missing]]\nFor more details, please send request for Json format to see the raw response from OpenSearch engine.",
          "type":"IndexNotFoundException"},
 "status":404}

That footer instructs the reader to re-send the request in another format to see the raw engine response — advice about this product's REST API, not about the statement the user just wrote — so it is removed (OPENSEARCH_DETAILS_FOOTER, http-transport.ts:246). Everything else is carried through verbatim, because the engine's own wording is the only text that tells a user which part of their statement is wrong.

3.7 A string-valued error means the request never reached the SQL engine

Measured: POST /_sql?format=json (the upstream path) against OpenSearch answers HTTP 405 with

{"error":"Incorrect HTTP method for uri [/_sql?format=json] and method [POST], allowed: [GET]","status":405}

and a POST with no content-type answers HTTP 406. Both spell error as a string where a real engine failure spells it as an object, which makes the JSON type of one field a reliable "this is not that product / the SQL plugin is not there" discriminator. It becomes the unreachable category, which the provider maps to ConnectionError — so a mis-picked type-id fails at the connection form rather than later on a query.

auth is the one category decided on the status (401/403). The probe cluster runs with the security plugin disabled and a bogus Basic header is ignored there (HTTP 200, measured), so no 401/403 body could be captured — and rather than invent one, the code uses the one signal whose meaning HTTP itself fixes (http-transport.ts:64-68).

3.8 The deadline is the client's, and only the client's

deadline() (index.ts:609) is one AbortSignal.timeout(this.queryTimeout) per operation, not per request — the monitoring reads below fan out several requests for one panel, and a panel that renders half its numbers after a stall is not a better answer than one that reports the stall.

Aborting closes this client's socket and nothing else: no cancellation request is sent, because the SQL endpoint offers none for a running statement. So the cluster finishes the statement it was given, which is what the cancelled message must not pretend otherwise about, and why cancelQuery is deliberately not implemented.

AbortSignal.timeout is used rather than a plain controller because its reason is a TimeoutError, which is the one signal that tells a deadline apart from a user's cancellation — measured on Node 24 and Bun, the thrown value cannot: controller.abort(new Error("x")) throws that Error verbatim, with nothing abort-shaped about it. requestFailure() (http-transport.ts:707) therefore consults signal.aborted before the thrown value.

3.9 Columns are labelled with mapping types, not SQL types

Measured: SELECT customer, total FROM probe_orders declares keyword and double — not VARCHAR and DOUBLE. That is the vocabulary a user wrote in their own index mapping, and it is the same vocabulary mapping() reports, which keeps the result grid and the schema tree speaking one language (transport.ts:92-104). A column whose declaration carried no type name is left out of columnTypes rather than given a placeholder.

3.10 No EXPLAIN: the statement form is refused

supportsExplain: false and no explainFormat is declared, which is what hides the button and the tab; src/lib/explain/ is untouched.

Measured: EXPLAIN SELECT customer FROM probe_orders sent to the SQL endpoint is HTTP 400, SQLFeatureNotSupportedException, "Query must start with SELECT, DELETE, SHOW or DESCRIBE" — the statement form does not exist in this grammar. A plan does exist behind a separate endpoint, POST /_plugins/_sql/_explain, which answers a tree (ProjectOperator over OpenSearchIndexScan, measured), and upstream answers a statement-form EXPLAIN with plan text instead. Two different shapes behind two different mechanisms, one of them not part of this seam at all, so neither type-id declares the capability: a tab that works on one of two products behind one code path is worse than no tab. Widening the seam by one call is the concrete follow-up (§13).

3.11 Positional parameters are refused, not emulated

The endpoint really does bind them — measured, {"query":"… WHERE id = ?","parameters":[{"type":"integer","value":"1"}]} answers HTTP 200 — but upstream spells the same request differently (a bare params array), the seam carries the statement alone, and inlining the values here to work around that would be building a SQL-injection site inside a provider. query() therefore throws a QueryError when params is non-empty (index.ts:625), the same call clickhouse/index.ts makes for the same reason (#264). positionalPlaceholder() in src/lib/sql/values.ts returns null for this dialect to match, so no shared generator emits a ? this provider would then decline to fill.


4. Connection

4.1 Configuration fields

The form offers exactly four fields (db-ui-config.ts:162): host, port, user, password.

FieldRequiredNotes
hostYesvalidate() (index.ts:529) throws DatabaseConfigError — "OpenSearch requires a host"
portNoDefaults to 9200 (index.ts:151); the fork kept the upstream port. The container fixture publishes 9201 on the host, which is a collision on that machine rather than a fact about the product
user / passwordNoSent as HTTP Basic only when user is set, for the security plugin. Measured with the plugin disabled: a bogus Basic header is ignored (HTTP 200), so credentials are genuinely optional. Note that a default distribution enables the plugin, serves HTTPS with a self-signed certificate and requires an admin password — see §4.3
sslNoAny mode but disable switches the transport to https (§4.3)
databaseNot offered, and ignored if set — see below

There is no database field, and that is not an omission. An index has no namespace above it, and this product's own SQL says so: SHOW TABLES LIKE % answers TABLE_CAT docker-cluster with TABLE_SCHEM null (measured). So a database selector would be a control with no effect, and worse, one implying a scoping decision the user does not have. The monitoring rows carry an empty schema name for the same reason (index.ts:167), which renders as no prefix at all — and doubles as the only value the schema filter can match, so a caller asking for public gets no rows rather than every row.

const connection = {
  id: 'os-1',
  name: 'OpenSearch',
  type: 'opensearch',
  host: '127.0.0.1',
  port: 9201,           // the fixture's host port; a real node is on 9200
  createdAt: new Date(),
};

4.2 There is no connection string, and that is deliberate

supportsConnectionString is false and showConnectionStringToggle is false, so the form has no paste tab. Two independent reasons, the same pair Druid records: there is no URI convention for this HTTP surface (the official client takes a node URL, which is not a credential-carrying DSN the shared parser could round-trip), and http:// / https:// are already claimed by ClickHouse in connection-string-parser.ts (#264).

connection-string-parser.ts is therefore not touched by this provider. The consequence is recorded rather than hidden — pasting http://localhost:9201 selects ClickHouse — and the connection-form hook's unparseable-string message deliberately omits both search ids (use-connection-form.ts:376).

4.3 TLS

config.ssl with any mode but disable switches the transport from http to https (http-transport.ts:819). ssl is a first-class DatabaseConnection field and independent of the form's connectionFields, so it applies even though this form shows no TLS row of its own, and an explicit disable turns TLS off as firmly as an explicit mode turns it on (the #264 lesson).

verify-system (D26) is the mode that DESCRIBES this transport: fetch always verifies the chain against the platform's certificate store and cannot be told otherwise, so of the four non-disable modes it is the only one whose name matches the handshake. require here does not mean "encrypt without checking" the way it does on the driver-based providers — nothing in this transport can skip a check — and verify-ca/verify-full cannot pin against a pasted CA. Nothing in the code branches on which one is selected.

The port is not changed by TLS: this product serves HTTPS on the same 9200, so there is no second well-known number to fall back to, and inventing one would send credentials to a port nothing is listening on.

ssl.caCert, ssl.clientCert and ssl.rejectUnauthorized are not honoured — global fetch cannot carry a custom CA or relax verification without an undici Agent as its dispatcher, and undici is not a dependency. This bites harder here than on most providers: a stock distribution with the security plugin enabled serves HTTPS with a self-signed certificate, which fails verification. Such a cluster needs a publicly-trusted certificate, a terminating proxy, or the plugin disabled — which is what the container fixture does (DISABLE_SECURITY_PLUGIN: "true"), and note that is the fork's own switch, not the upstream key: the plugin is installed rather than a licensed feature, so it is disabled by name.

An IPv6 literal host is bracketed before it becomes a URL authority (http-transport.ts:431).


5. Query interface

5.1 Execution

query(sql, params?) (index.ts:625) sends one statement under the client deadline from §3.8:

await provider.query('SELECT customer, total FROM probe_orders LIMIT 50');
await provider.query('SELECT customer FROM probe_orders LIMIT 2 OFFSET 1');   // accepted here

A write is not special-cased: this grammar names everything it would have accepted in its own error message, which is more useful than anything substituted here (§5.6).

5.2 Result shaping

toQueryResult() (index.ts:275):

SourceQueryResult fieldNotes
datarowsrowsRebuilt from the positional arrays, keyed by the declared names
schema[].alias ?? schema[].namefieldsDeclared order; the alias wins (§3.4)
rowCountrows.length. There is no second number: no statement here reaches a document, so a mutation count could only ever be zero
the measured exchangeexecutionTimeRounded milliseconds, measured by this process. Neither the body nor the headers carry any timing
schema[].typecolumnTypesThe engine's mapping types; absent when the answer declared none (§3.9)
totalDeliberately dropped. See below
warningsNone are produced

totalHits is available here and is deliberately unused. The upstream product reports no matching-document count at all, so a "showing 50 of 4,812" notice would appear on one product and never on the other for identical statements — and it would restate what the route's own pagination already tells the UI (hasMore, limit, offset). A caveat attached to every ordinary query is the fastest way to train a user to ignore the ones that matter, which is the argument druid.md makes about its own warnings. The count is dropped knowingly; docs/BACKLOG.md is where it belongs if a surface for it ever exists (index.ts:260-269).

5.3 A container field comes back as its sub-document

Measured, and a real divergence from upstream: SELECT * FROM probe_shapes here answers HTTP 200 with the container fields and their values

{"schema":[{"name":"items","type":"nested"},{"name":"note","type":"text"},{"name":"address","type":"object"}],
 "datarows":[[[{"sku":"A1"}],"hello there",{"city":"Ankara"}]]}

— while the same statement upstream expands to the leaves only, silently dropping every container: measured on the same mapping, Elasticsearch answers {"columns":[{"name":"address.city","type":"keyword"},{"name":"note","type":"text"}], …}, and a container named explicitly there is a hard verification_exception ("Cannot use field [address] type [object] only its subfields"). On an index whose mapping is only container and unsupported types that expansion leaves nothing at all — {"columns":[],"rows":[[]]}, which is one of the two reasons the schema never comes from a statement (introspect.ts:9-16).

This provider does not exploit the permissiveness: containers are excluded from the schema tree on both products, because a starter query that works on one and fails on the other is worse than one that works on both (§6). A statement the user types themselves is of course still served exactly as this engine serves it — an object cell simply arrives as a JSON object in the grid, with the mapping type (object, nested) as its label.

No value rewriting happens anywhere in this provider.

5.4 Dialect traps a user will hit

These are OpenSearch's, not the provider's. All were measured on 3.8.0, and most of them are the mirror image of the upstream product's — which is exactly why the two docs are separate.

Double quotes are a STRING LITERAL, not an identifier quote, and that is the dangerous one. Measured:

SELECT customer FROM "probe_orders"
-> 404  IndexNotFoundException  'no such index ["probe_orders"]'      (quotes and all)

SELECT "customer" FROM probe_orders
-> 200  {"schema":[{"name":"\"customer\"","type":"keyword"}],"datarows":[["customer"]]}

The second is worse than an error: it returns the literal string customer for every row, and a predicate written that way (WHERE "customer" = 'acme') compares two literals and answers 0 rows with no failure at all. Backticks are the identifier form here — SELECT customer FROM `probe_orders` is HTTP 200 — which is why opensearch shares MySQL's branch in src/lib/sql/identifier.ts:36 while elasticsearch sits in the double-quote default (it answers a backtick with "backquoted identifiers not supported; please use double quotes instead"). The two search ids genuinely cannot share a quoting branch.

[…] is also an identifier quote, MySQL/SQL-Server style: SELECT [customer] FROM probe_orders answers the field's value, while SELECT [1, 2] is refused with "All items between Brackets should be identifiers, got:LITERAL_INT". So OPENSEARCH_GRAMMAR.bracket is "quoted-identifier" (grammar.ts:199) — where elasticsearch leaves it at the default, because [ has no meaning in that grammar at all.

# really is a line comment, and this is where the fork's SQL plugin parts company with upstream. Three probes, because "the statement still ran" is not enough to tell a comment from an ignored token:

SELECT 1 AS a # , 2 AS b            -> 200, ONE column: the rest was hidden
SELECT 1 AS a # hidden\n, 2 AS b    -> 200, TWO columns: the run ended at the newline
SELECT customer # FROM probe_orders -> SemanticCheckException: the FROM was hidden

So hash: "comment" here and "code" upstream. This matters beyond cosmetics: since #297 the confirmation gate reads a statement's spans to decide whether a write is hiding behind a comment, and an unreadable span is a prompt rather than silence.

A trailing semicolon is accepted. SELECT 1; is HTTP 200 here and a parsing_exception upstream — so the generated statement (SELECT * FROM probe_orders LIMIT 50;) ran on this product and failed on the other (elasticsearch.md §5.4). This product nevertheless declares statementTerminator: "none" along with the upstream one, because the absence of the terminator is accepted here too (measured) and one answer that runs on both beats a branch on dialect — the same rule that keeps getCapabilities() a single answer for both type-ids.

String literals accept BOTH escape forms. Measured: SELECT 'a''b'a'b, so doubling works; SELECT 'a\'b'a'b too, so a backslash escapes the quote; SELECT 'a\\b' → one backslash, so it escapes itself; and SELECT 'a\' is a ParserException, because the trailing backslash escaped the closing quote and left the literal open — which is exactly the defect #290 is about. Hence opensearch: "double-and-backslash" in src/lib/sql/values.ts:55, where elasticsearch is "standard" (a backslash there is data).

_id is selectable here. SELECT _id FROM probe_orders returns the document id; upstream answers "Unknown column [_id]". It is still not reported as a column or as a key, because it is metadata rather than a mapped field and because the same statement is not portable to the sibling type-id (§6).

Block comments do not nest, same as upstream: SELECT /* a /* b */ 1 AS a is HTTP 200, so the first */ closed the run.

5.5 OFFSET works here, which is why paging does

Measured: SELECT customer FROM probe_orders LIMIT 2 OFFSET 1 is HTTP 200 with the rows the offset asks for. Upstream refuses it outright (parsing_exception, "mismatched input 'OFFSET' expecting "), and that single fact is the one behavioural difference above the wire between the two type-ids.

It is declared as a trait, acceptsOffsetClause: true (index.ts:239-243), and read by prepareQuery() alone (index.ts:505) — which therefore never refuses anything on this product and returns exactly what the inherited limiter produced. A method that asked this.dialect === "opensearch" would be the thing both the seam's rule and CLAUDE.md exist to prevent; a method that reads this.product.acceptsOffsetClause states which capability it depends on, and a third product declares its own answer instead of being added to a condition someone has to find.

The practical consequence: the editor's "load more" works on an OpenSearch connection and is refused on an Elasticsearch one. Same provider code, same UI, one measured grammar difference.

5.6 This grammar has DELETE, and it is off

Measured on a stock 3.8.0 node, every mutation is HTTP 400 with SQLFeatureNotSupportedException, "Query must start with SELECT, DELETE, SHOW or DESCRIBE: …":

statementnote
INSERT INTO probe_orders …not in the grammar
UPDATE probe_orders SET customer = 'x' WHERE id = 1not in the grammar
CREATE TABLE t (id BIGINT)not in the grammar
ALTER TABLE probe_orders ADD COLUMN x INTnot in the grammar
DELETE FROM probe_orders WHERE id = 99is in the grammar — the error names it — and is refused because the plugin's DELETE support is off by default

The error message is the same for all five, which is worth knowing: it enumerates what the grammar accepts, so "DELETE" appearing in a message about a refused DELETE is the plugin telling you the statement form exists and the setting does not permit it.

Consequences elsewhere in the product:

  • supportsCreateTable: false and supportsInlineRowEdit: false are facts about the grammar, not unimplemented features, so the EDIT toggle and the editable cell are not offered (#269).
  • The schema-diff migration generator emits, in place of a column change: "OpenSearch SQL reads only; change a field by reindexing into an index whose mapping declares it." (the NO_COLUMN_MODIFICATION table in migration-generator.ts). It says reindex rather than "use the mapping API" because an existing field's type cannot be changed in place at all, even outside SQL.
  • schemaRefreshPattern is \b(DELETE)\b (index.ts:193) and this is the product it exists for: a cluster that switches DELETE on really does change the per-index document counts this provider reports, so a statement matching it refreshes the schema. Upstream has no DELETE in its grammar at all, so there the pattern never fires — exactly as Druid's INSERT|REPLACE never fires against its native engine.

Documents otherwise change through the document APIs (_doc, _bulk, _delete_by_query), which this seam does not expose.


6. Schema introspection

getSchema() (introspect.ts:355) makes one index listing plus one mapping read per index, at most SEARCH_MAPPING_CONCURRENCY = 4 at a time (introspect.ts:102) — the number Couchbase's per-collection inference settled on for the same trade-off, and _mapping is a cluster-state read rather than a search.

DataSource
Indices (the "tables")GET /_cat/indices?format=json&bytes=b
ColumnsGET /<index>/_mapping, flattened to dotted paths
rowCount / sizedocs.count / pri.store.size from the same listing, omitted when the server reported none
Indexesalways []
Foreign keysalways []

The schema comes from the MAPPING, not from SQL. Two independent reasons, and the second is specific to this product: SELECT * describes the statement rather than the index, and the two products do not even agree on what it describes — measured, SELECT * here returns the container fields with their sub-documents while upstream expands the same mapping to its leaves only, and can answer with no columns at all when a mapping has nothing but containers and unsupported types (§5.3). A tree built on that would differ per product for the same index. The mapping is the index's own declaration, is readable on a closed index, and is the document the user edits.

System indices are the thing to know about this product. Measured on a stock 3.8.0 cluster with two probe indices created by hand, _cat/indices listed four:

.plugins-ml-config              (engine bookkeeping, dot-prefixed)
probe_orders                    (the user's)
probe_shapes                    (the user's)
top_queries-2026.08.18-74305    (engine bookkeeping, NO leading dot)

On an empty cluster two of three indices are the engine's. The dot convention catches the first and not the second, so the transport carries a second rule for the date-suffixed query-insights shape (/^top_queries-\d{4}\.\d{2}\.\d{2}-\d+$/, http-transport.ts:264) — which makes this a judgement rather than a rule, and is why the seam exposes a flag the provider decides about (isSystemIndex(), introspect.ts:156) rather than a filter applied on the wire. Hiding them is the default; SearchSchemaOptions.includeSystemIndices exists because both answers are legitimate and the caller knows which — an operator debugging ML inference wants .plugins-ml-config in the tree, and a developer writing a query does not want two thirds of the sidebar to be indices they have never heard of.

Note also that top_queries-2026.08.18-74305 carries hyphens and dots, so it is a name SQL needs quoted. TableSchema.name is the index name verbatim — quoting belongs to whoever builds a statement, not to the inventory (introspect.ts:324-336) — and on this product the quote character is a backtick (§5.4).

The flattening. flattenProperties() (http-transport.ts:776) descends both properties (objects) and fields (multi-fields), emitting containers, leaves and dotted children: for probe_shapes that is address/object, address.city/keyword, items/nested, items.sku/keyword, note/text, note.keyword/keyword. The output set is specified by the upstream product's own DESCRIBE (measured, elasticsearch.md §6), because that is the stricter of the two surfaces and a column list valid there is valid here. Nothing outside properties is read — measured, this product's own .plugins-ml-config mapping carries a sibling _meta object at the same level, which is metadata about the mapping rather than a field in it.

Containers are not columns; a multi-field parent is. SEARCH_CONTAINER_TYPES = ["object", "nested"] (introspect.ts:90) are dropped, and this is the one place the provider is deliberately stricter than this engine allows: upstream refuses SELECT address outright, this product answers it with the sub-document, and query-generators.ts builds its starter query by enumerating every declared column. Projecting the leaves works on both; listing the container would hand an Elasticsearch user a query that cannot run at all. A text field with a keyword sub-field is kept as a column, because its own type is not a container type and both note and note.keyword are separately queryable.

Every column is nullable and none is primary (introspect.ts:195):

  • nullable: true is a measurement. A mapping declares how a field is indexed if a document carries it; there is no NOT NULL in the model, and a document indexed without a field comes back as null.
  • isPrimary: false always. Nothing a mapping declares is unique — indexing the same body twice yields two documents — and the only unique thing in an index is _id, which is metadata rather than a mapped field. This product does expose _id in SQL while upstream does not, so treating it as a key here would also make the two type-ids disagree about the same index. And isPrimary is stated as fact wherever it is read: sql-completions.ts appends "(PK)", the agent's schema context puts " PK" into what a model reasons from, and schema-diff reports "Primary key changed" — a key invented here becomes a key the product asserts. ColumnSchema has no "document identity" field, and inventing one out of isPrimary would be a different concept wearing its name.
  • defaultValue is left undefined. A mapping's null_value is not a default: it is the term substituted into the index for an explicit null so the value becomes searchable, and it changes no value any document carries.

Column order is sorted by path, by code unit, not by the server's order and not by locale (introspect.ts:244): a mapping has no declaration order to preserve, because documents are unordered JSON. Sorting by path also keeps address.city and items.sku next to their siblings once the containers are dropped.

A closed index is kept, and reads honestly: its _cat row reports the status word close (not "closed") with docs.count and pri.store.size as JSON null, while _mapping still answers in full. So it is described completely with rowCount and size omitted rather than zeroed — TableSchema makes both optional, which is what preserves the distinction.

A per-index failure costs one index's columns, not the tree. Only auth and unknown-object degrade to an empty column list (DEGRADABLE_MAPPING_FAILURES, introspect.ts:119): the security plugin grants index privileges per index, so a role that lists twenty indices and may describe nineteen is an ordinary configuration; and an index deleted between the listing and its mapping read is a race, not a fault. This is where the two fault vocabularies matter most: a missing index reported by _mapping is snake_case index_not_found_exception while the SQL endpoint says IndexNotFoundException, and both are in the fault table (http-transport.ts:395-401). A live probe of mapping() is what caught that — the SQL fixtures alone would have left a missing index reported as an engine fault by introspection, i.e. propagating and blanking the whole tree instead of degrading one index.

getSchemaList() and getSchemaRelations() are deliberately not implemented: both are optional and the client falls back to getSchema(); here both halves are empty by construction, so a list would be byte-identical and a relations pass would re-read every mapping to return the same empty arrays.


7. Monitoring & health

Every read goes through guarded() (search/index.ts), which maps a seam failure onto this repo's error classes (§10). The only read allowed to fail quietly is the cluster-wide store size (§7.1).

Every method in the table lives in that file and is cited by name, not by line: the line numbers this table used to carry had drifted, and a method name is greppable and stays true.

MethodSourceMapping
getOverview()/, _cluster/health, _cat/indicesthree seam calls in parallelversion = "OpenSearch <number>"; uptime = "N/A"; activeConnections = absent; maxConnections = 0; databaseSize(Bytes) = the cluster's store from _cluster/stats, the byte key absent when the cluster publishes no size; tableCount = user indices only; indexCount = 0
getPerformanceMetrics(){}, and it asks the cluster nothing
getSlowQueries()[] — and on this product that is a choice, not an absence. See below
getIndexStats()[]. No secondary-index object exists
getActiveSessions()[]. A request is one HTTP request; there is no session and no connection catalog
getTableStats()_cat/indicesone row per user index: rowCount = docs.count, tableSize(Bytes) = totalSize(Bytes) = pri.store.size, schemaName = ""; tableSize(Bytes) omitted when the index published no size (§7)
getStorageStats()_cluster/health + _cluster/statsone row for the cluster: name = cluster_name, sizeBytes = indices.store.size_in_bytes. No row at all when the size was unreported
getHealth()the above, composeddatabaseSize; activeConnections omitted, carrying the overview's absence across; cacheHitRatio = the repo's word for "not measured"; slowQueries = []; activeSessions = []

The slow-query panel is empty even though this product keeps top-N queries. That is the sharpest "deliberately unused" decision in the provider: a stock 3.8.0 node ships a top_queries-<date> index — this provider hides it as engine bookkeeping (§6) — while upstream writes its slow log to a node log file that no API returns. Reading it would be a monitoring surface that exists on one of two products behind one code path, i.e. exactly the branch on product identity that the seam and CLAUDE.md both forbid. A slow-query panel populated for half the connections of one provider type is worse than an honest empty one (the comment over getSlowQueries() in search/index.ts).

Two vocabulary collisions, both counted wrong by the obvious reading:

  • tableCount counts INDICES — an index is the table here — and counts only the user's, matching what the schema tree shows by default. On the measured cluster that is 2 of 4; counting everything would report a cluster holding data nobody put there.
  • indexCount is 0 and stays 0. There is no secondary-index object: every mapped field is inverted-indexed as a property of being mapped. The schema tree says the same from the other side with indexes: [].

databaseSizeBytes is the CLUSTER's store including replicas, while the per-index sizes are primaries only (pri.store.size, chosen deliberately by CAT_FIELDS.PRIMARY_SIZE in http-transport.ts), so they do not sum to it — and _cluster/stats is the one place in this transport where a count arrives as a real JSON number (indices.store.size_in_bytes, measured unquoted on both products) rather than a quoted string.

An unpublished store size is an absent key, not a 0. databaseSizeBytes is optional, and getOverview() omits it whenever _cluster/stats reported nothing (§7.1) — it used to pair a 0 with the "N/A" its own databaseSize printed from the same input, one object making two different claims. StorageTab.tsx keys its refusal off the missing key, so the Storage tab now draws that refusal instead of a 0 B total with a 0.0% breakdown under it. A cluster that really stores nothing publishes a real 0 and keeps it.

The honest empties, each with its reason:

  • getPerformanceMetrics() returns {}, not zeroes, and this is load-bearing. cacheHitRatio is scored direction: "below" with critical: 80 by DEFAULT_THRESHOLDS, so a "neutral" 0 would paint a red critical cache fault on every healthy cluster; the monitoring tabs default an absent ratio to a healthy 100 instead. Every other metric would read as a measurement of zero — and the tabs did read them that way until the rule #448 settled for the Storage tab reached them: measured 2026-08-19 on this product, the Overview showed Buffer Pool 0% and Deadlocks 0 for two fields this payload omits. Both cards now read N/A beside Not measured, so the empty payload survives to the screen. The numbers exist on this product's stats endpoints, so this is a recorded gap rather than an impossibility.
  • getSlowQueries() and getActiveSessions() return [] rather than throwing. Nothing is broken and nothing is misconfigured, so a monitoring tab should render as quiet, not as failed. Only runMaintenance() throws, because that one is a request to act.
  • activeConnections is absent, not 0. The cluster counts open HTTP connections per node in its stats API, which is not one of this seam's five calls, and the shard and node counts that are here would be a different number wearing this field's name — so nothing is knowable, and the field is optional precisely so that can be said. getHealth() carries the missing key across rather than filling it in, and OverviewTab.tsx renders the Connections card as N/A over not published with no share of the limit, instead of a 0 under a healthy tick. This provider held the last unconditional activeConnections: 0 in the codebase - SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB and Cassandra had already omitted it - but not the last zero of any kind: Trino, Druid, ClickHouse and Couchbase each degrade an unavailable monitoring read to no rows and then map the absent row to 0 (BACKLOG D51).
  • maxConnections is 0, and that is the correct encoding — the opposite one, for the opposite reason: for the ceiling 0 and absence are the same fact, which is why Druid and Trino cite mssql.ts for it and why the Connections card reads a zero maximum as "no limit published" rather than dividing by it.
  • uptime is "N/A". No call in this seam carries one; a "0s" would claim the cluster booted this instant.

A closed index zeroes only the required getTableStats() fields, and omits the optional ones. TableStats.rowCount, totalSize and totalSizeBytes are required numbers, so for those three a closed index has nowhere to read but zero. tableSize and tableSizeBytes are optional, so they are absent rather than 0: a zero there would be a fabricated measurement rather than a forced one. The schema tree makes the same distinction with its own optional TableSchema.rowCount and size (the comment over toTableStats() in search/index.ts).

One closed index takes the Data figure away from the whole cluster, and that cost is deliberate. StorageTab gates that figure on tables.every((t) => t.tableSizeBytes !== undefined), so as soon as one index publishes no size the Tables card reads N/A for every open index beside it instead of a sum over the indices that did answer. A partial sum would read as a measurement of the cluster, which is the same lie the 0 B it replaced told about the one index, one digit larger. The open-beside-closed pair is pinned in opensearch-provider.test.ts so the aggregate is asserted, not inferred.

Document counts exceed what a SELECT returns when a mapping has nested fields, and this was measured here: probe_shapes reports 2 documents in _cat/indices while SELECT COUNT(*) answers 1, because every nested element is stored as a document of its own. The panel reports the cluster's document count — which is what a "row" is on this surface — not the number of rows a query produces, so an index with nested fields always reads higher here than in the editor. Deriving it from SQL instead would mean a statement per index, on a surface whose grammar the tree must not depend on, to answer a different question than the panel asks.

7.1 The one swallowed failure

_cluster/stats is heavier and more privileged than _cluster/health, so a cluster that answers health and refuses stats is an ordinary configuration. storeSizeBytes() (http-transport.ts) therefore catches its own failure and returns null — the seam's "unknown" — because losing the health status over a missing byte count would blank a panel that already had the important number. Its null then propagates honestly: getOverview() shows "N/A" for the size and omits databaseSizeBytes, and getStorageStats() returns no row at all rather than a row claiming the cluster stores zero bytes.


8. Maintenance

There is none. supportsMaintenance is false and maintenanceOperations is [], so no maintenance control renders for this connection: TablesTab.tsx reads the connected provider's capabilities (#272) and OperationsTab.tsx hides the whole Global Operations group where supportsMaintenance is false (#282). That first tab's Vacuum summary card reads the same declaration: it counted rows over a bloat ratio this provider never publishes, so it always said 0 over a green OK — a clean bill of health for an operation named below as impossible here — and it now says N/A over Not supported, with a dash in the per-row Bloat and Last Vacuum cells.

Every MaintenanceType is either an index API rather than a statement, or impossible on this surface altogether:

  • vacuum / optimize / reindex / check — the nearest analogues are _refresh, _forcemerge, _reindex and _cache/clear, all index APIs on the cluster, none of them a statement this SQL surface accepts.
  • analyze — the cluster maintains its per-shard statistics itself as documents are indexed, and no statement recomputes them. (The engine's own _analyze is text analysis, an entirely different operation, which is why the labels below avoid the bare word "Analyze".)
  • kill — impossible for a second, independent reason: an abort closes this client's socket while the cluster keeps working (§3.8), and the task API that could really cancel a search is not part of this seam.

runMaintenance(type) (search/index.ts) exists because the DatabaseProvider interface obliges every provider to implement it, and not because a request reaches it: /api/db/maintenance checks supportsMaintenance and answers 400 first. So the message below is what a programmatic caller of @libredb/studio sees:

OpenSearch has no SQL-reachable maintenance operation, so "<type>" cannot run here. Refreshing, merging segments and clearing caches are index APIs on the cluster rather than statements, and a running search cannot be cancelled through this surface.

Throwing rather than reporting a cheerful success is the point — a caller that asked for work must not be told work happened.


9. Capabilities & labels

getCapabilities() (index.ts:388)

One answer for both products, because every flag here measured the same on both. The single difference — OFFSET — has no field in ProviderCapabilities to declare it in, so it lives on SearchProduct and is read by prepareQuery() alone (§5.5).

CapabilityValueWhy
queryLanguagesqlThe bundled SQL plugin, present on a stock node (§3.3)
supportsExplainfalseThe statement form is refused here and the plan lives behind a second endpoint outside this seam (§3.10)
supportsExternalQueryLimitingtrueBoth limiter forms are correct here, LIMIT n and LIMIT n OFFSET m
supportsCreateTablefalseNot in the grammar (§5.6)
supportsInlineRowEditfalseUPDATE is not in the grammar, so the editor's statement could only ever produce an error (#269)
supportsTransactionsfalseBEGIN is not in the grammar and the surface is stateless HTTP. Measured 2026-08-19 on OpenSearch 3.8.0: POST /api/db/transaction answered HTTP 400, "Transaction control is not supported for this database type", for both begin and rollback — the measurement #U13 came from
declaresForeignKeysfalseThe engine has no such constraint in its model, so the empty foreignKeys means "impossible here" rather than "none declared, or none visible to this role" — the distinction #414 was about
supportsMaintenancefalseNothing in MaintenanceType is SQL-reachable (§8)
maintenanceOperations[]Consequence of the above
supportsConnectionStringfalseNo URI convention, and http(s):// is ClickHouse's (§4.2)
defaultPort9200Both schemes; the fixture publishes 9201 on the host (§4.1)
identifierQuotingbacktickThe difference that fails silently: a double-quoted name here is a string literal, so a generated WHERE "customer" = 'acme' answers HTTP 200 with no rows (§5.4)
statementTerminatornoneDeclared even though this product accepts ;: the absence runs here too, and the upstream grammar has no terminator at all, so one answer serves both (§5.4)
schemaRefreshPattern\b(DELETE)\bThis is the product it exists for: a cluster with DELETE enabled really changes the counts this provider reports (§5.6)

isGroupedKeyspace is deliberately absent: an index is a real object the cluster holds, named by whoever created it and addressable in a statement — not a grouping a server derived from a scan, which is what Redis and LibreDB declare.

getLabels() (index.ts:455)

LabelValue
entityName / entityNamePluralIndex / Indices
rowName / rowNamePluraldocument / documents
selectActionSelect Top 50 Documents
analyzeAction / analyzeGlobalLabelIndex Statistics
vacuumAction / vacuumGlobalLabelMerge Segments
searchPlaceholderSearch indices or fields...
statementLanguageOpenSearch SQL, the SQL plugin's own dialect - NOT the JSON query DSL, NOT an aggregation body, and NOT PPL
slowQueriesEmptyStateThe slow log is written to the node's own log file, which no API returns, so this SQL surface does not reach it.

statementLanguage is the one label written for a model rather than for the UI, and this product's spelling differs from the upstream one because its alternatives do: the SQL plugin ships PPL beside SQL, and ES|QL does not exist here. The run that made the field necessary was on this product — a plan run answered with a native aggregation body, correct for the cluster and unrunnable through the SQL endpoint (measured in the browser, 2026-08-19). See elasticsearch.md §9 for the mechanism, which is shared.

slowQueriesEmptyState is the monitoring Queries panel's empty state, and it says what §7 already says about getSlowQueries(). That sentence was hardcoded to PostgreSQL's pg_stat_statements advice on every engine, measured in the browser on 2026-08-19 against this panel on a search connection (#463) - the #427 defect in another panel, and fixed the same way: by reading the label.

These are not decoration. inventory-noun.ts lowercases entityName into the noun the agent reasons with, so a cluster described as holding "tables" of "rows" invites statements written for a relational engine. "Indices" rather than "Indexes" because that is the plural this product's own API and documentation use — and because "indexes" is the word this codebase already uses for the secondary-index objects an index does not have (TableSchema.indexes, empty by construction here).

The two maintenance actions are named even though supportsMaintenance is false, because they are still rendered where an engine has maintenance to run, and their global descriptions say in words that nothing runs from here. They are no longer offered in this engine's schema tree: that was a dead end into a page whose maintenance card is gated on the same capability, and TableItem.tsx now requires both an addressable row and a declared capability. See elasticsearch.md §9 for the measurement.


10. Error handling

The transport normalizes every failure into SearchTransportError { category, message, engineType? } (transport.ts:153); mapSearchError() (index.ts:671) maps the category — never the HTTP status — onto the shared classes in src/lib/db/errors.ts. Every category is listed and there is no default, so adding one to the seam fails the typecheck here instead of being quietly swallowed as a query error.

CategoryMeasured trigger on this productError raised
authHTTP 401/403 (status-decided; see §3.7)AuthenticationError
unreachableA refused socket, an unresolvable host, or a string-valued error — the upstream endpoint path (HTTP 405 here), a missing content type (406)ConnectionError carrying host and port
timeoutThe client deadline expired (AbortSignal.timeout)TimeoutError — and the cluster is still working on the statement
cancelledThe caller abortedQueryCancelledError
syntaxParserException, EOFParserException (matched by suffix), NumberFormatExceptionQueryError
unknown-objectIndexNotFoundException (SQL, 404), index_not_found_exception (core REST, 404), SemanticCheckExceptionQueryError
unsupportedSQLFeatureNotSupportedException — a mistyped leading keyword, every refused mutation, a statement-form EXPLAINQueryError
engineIllegalArgumentException (duplicate output names), NullPointerException, any unrecognised fault name, the paging ceiling, an unreadable bodyQueryError

The four that collapse onto QueryError do so because they describe the same event to a user — the cluster read the statement and refused it — and the engine's own wording, carried through the seam verbatim, is what distinguishes them on screen. unsupported is mapped here rather than to a configuration error for a measured reason: on this product it is what a mistyped leading keyword answers, which is a statement problem and nothing about the deployment (index.ts:660-666).

A value that is not a seam error never came from the cluster (an internal defect, an assertion) and goes to the shared message-based mapError(), exactly as druid/index.ts and clickhouse/index.ts do.

The unreachable message quotes the cause from both places a runtime puts it, because this repo runs on two: on Node a refused socket is TypeError: fetch failed whose cause.code is ECONNREFUSED, while Bun throws Error: Unable to connect. Is the computer able to access the url? with code: "ConnectionRefused" on the error itself and no cause at all (http-transport.ts:677-729).

SituationError
Missing hostDatabaseConfigError — "OpenSearch requires a host"
Operation before connect()DatabaseConfigError (via ensureConnected())
connect() fails on credentialsAuthenticationError — a rejected credential is not a connectivity problem
connect() fails otherwiseConnectionError — "Failed to connect to OpenSearch: …", carrying the cluster's own words (which for the two commonest mistakes are the useful ones: a refused socket names the code, and the wrong endpoint path is quoted verbatim)
query(sql, params) with parametersQueryError, raised before anything leaves the process (§3.11)
More result pages than MAX_PAGESQueryError naming the ceiling and advising a narrower statement — after the abandoned cursor is closed (§3.5)

11. Testing

11.1 How the tests work

There is no mock.module() anywhere in the search suite — it is process-wide in bun and would poison sibling files.

  • tests/integration/db/opensearch-provider.test.ts replaces globalThis.fetch per test and restores it in afterEach, so the real transport, the real introspection and the real provider all run — only the cluster is fake. Every payload was captured from a live 3.8.0 node (probe_orders, probe_shapes), so the fake speaks exactly what the server speaks. This file's job is the DIVERGENCE: one implementation serves two type-ids, the Elasticsearch sibling covers what the two share, and what is asserted here is what this product does differently — the schema/datarows envelope with its total, the separate alias, the 404 missing index, the Java-class fault names beside the one snake_case name from the core REST layer, the refused duplicate output name, the accepted OFFSET, and the system indices the dot rule alone does not catch. That is what makes "two type-ids, one implementation" a tested claim rather than an assumption.
  • tests/integration/db/elasticsearch-provider.test.ts carries the shared behaviour and the upstream-only measurements (engine-initiated paging with its column-less second page, the duplicate-name disambiguation, the 400/500 status inversion).
  • tests/unit/db/search/introspect.test.ts drives introspection through a hand-built SearchTransport — the payoff of the seam: no fetch mocking and no server. Its fake's query() throws on purpose, because introspection reading a statement would be a design regression rather than a test failure.
  • tests/unit/db/search/seam-guard.test.ts is a parser, not a grep, and proves itself in both directions: it must fire on http-transport.ts and stay silent on a compliant sample before it asserts the provider directory is clean.

11.2 Coverage

Validation (host required), capabilities and labels, connect/disconnect including the SELECT 1 probe surfacing a wrong endpoint or a rejected credential, query execution and result shaping (the alias preference, the declared order, the measured duration, the dropped totalHits), the full category-to-error map across both fault vocabularies, prepareQuery() passing an OFFSET statement through untouched, mapping-driven schema (containers dropped, multi-fields dropped, closed index, both system-index rules, the degradable per-index failures), every monitoring method and its empties, and runMaintenance() refusing with its reason.

11.3 Run it

bun test tests/integration/db/opensearch-provider.test.ts
bun test tests/unit/db/search

# Full isolated suite (CI-equivalent)
bun run test

11.4 Optional: reproducing the live pass

The committed tests never touch a cluster. To reproduce the measurements behind this document, database-compose.yml carries the exact build this provider was verified against, and deliberately no profile — unlike Druid's block — because these are shipped providers and a plain docker compose up has to be able to reproduce their integration pass:

docker compose -f database-compose.yml up -d elasticsearch opensearch

Both services run together on purpose: every claim this document records is a claim about which of the two answered differently, and that can only be re-measured side by side. This service publishes 9201 on the host because both products ship on 9200 in the container.

Under which licence. The licence the pinned image ships is Apache-2.0: /usr/share/opensearch/LICENSE.txt inside the image is the Apache License, Version 2.0. There is no subscription tier here to confuse with the software licence, which is the distinction the upstream product forces (elasticsearch.md §11.4), and nothing in it constrains this provider either way.

Two configuration details are load-bearing:

  • DISABLE_SECURITY_PLUGIN: "true" — the fork's own switch, not the upstream xpack.security.enabled key, because the plugin is installed rather than a licensed feature. Without it the node serves HTTPS with a self-signed certificate and a default admin password, which this provider cannot verify (§4.3).
  • The health check waits for yellow, not green: a single node with a replica requested is yellow forever, so waiting for green would hang.

The image is pinned, and here the reason is sharper than usual: the SQL plugin's fault names are Java class names that its own releases rename, and the whole classification table (§3.6) is keyed on them.

There is no seed sidecar, and one thing to expect instead: a stock node ships its own indices, so two thirds of an empty cluster's index listing is engine bookkeeping (§6). Seed the probe indices with the document API — there is no CREATE TABLE here:

curl -s -XPOST -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  'http://localhost:9201/probe_orders/_doc?refresh=true' \
  -d '{"id":1,"customer":"acme","total":9.5}'

# an object, a nested array and a multi-field: what §6's flattening and the
# nested-document-count finding are measured against
curl -s -XPUT -H 'content-type: application/json' 'http://localhost:9201/probe_shapes' \
  -d '{"mappings":{"properties":{"address":{"properties":{"city":{"type":"keyword"}}},
                                 "items":{"type":"nested","properties":{"sku":{"type":"keyword"}}},
                                 "note":{"type":"text","fields":{"keyword":{"type":"keyword"}}}}}}'
curl -s -XPOST -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  'http://localhost:9201/probe_shapes/_doc?refresh=true' \
  -d '{"address":{"city":"Ankara"},"items":[{"sku":"A1"}],"note":"hello there"}'

probe_shapes is the one that matters: one document with one nested element is what makes _cat report 2 while SELECT COUNT(*) answers 1 (§7).


12. Usage examples

12.1 Programmatic (via the factory)

import { createDatabaseProvider } from '@/lib/db/factory';

const provider = await createDatabaseProvider({
  id: 'os1', name: 'OpenSearch', type: 'opensearch',
  host: '127.0.0.1', port: 9201,
  createdAt: new Date(),
});

await provider.connect();                              // proves the port AND the product

const rows   = await provider.query('SELECT * FROM probe_orders LIMIT 50;');   // ';' is fine here
const page2  = await provider.query('SELECT customer FROM probe_orders LIMIT 50 OFFSET 50');
const quoted = await provider.query('SELECT customer FROM `top_queries-2026.08.18-74305`');
const schema = await provider.getSchema();             // indices + mapped fields; indexes always []
const stats  = await provider.getTableStats();         // documents and primary bytes per index

await provider.disconnect();

The habit worth keeping is the third line: backticks, never double quotes. A double-quoted name is a string literal here, and in a projection it silently returns the name itself rather than the field (§5.4).

12.2 Over the API

POST /api/db/query with the statement in the sql field — the same contract every SQL provider uses. POST /api/db/maintenance answers 400 before reaching the provider (§8). The transaction and cancel routes do not apply: /api/db/cancel reports cancellation as unsupported because the provider exposes no cancelQuery (§3.8).


13. Known limitations & future work

  • No EXPLAIN. supportsExplain: false, so the button and the tab are hidden. EXPLAIN <select> as a statement is refused here (SQLFeatureNotSupportedException), and the plan that does exist lives behind POST /_plugins/_sql/_explain — a second endpoint outside this seam, whose tree shape is not what upstream returns either (§3.10). Widening the seam by one call is the concrete follow-up.
  • Aliases and data streams are not listed in the schema tree. They come from other endpoints (_alias, _data_stream) that this seam does not carry, so a queryable alias does not appear in the sidebar even though SQL accepts it. Recorded on the seam itself (transport.ts:205-219); the mapping read already tolerates the case, taking the single entry of the payload rather than looking it up by the requested name, because an alias resolves to the concrete index behind it.
  • No maintenance operations at all (§8).
  • No active sessions, and no slow queries — the second one by choice rather than by absence: this product's top_queries-<date> index really does hold them, and reading it would populate a panel for one of the two type-ids behind one code path (§7).
  • An index whose mapping has nested fields reports more documents than a SELECT returns. Measured here: probe_shapes is 2 documents in _cat/indices and 1 row to SELECT COUNT(*) (§7).
  • totalHits is reported by this product and deliberately dropped, so no surface behaves differently between the two type-ids — the upstream product sends no count at all (§5.2).
  • A trailing semicolon is accepted here and fails upstream. Recorded because it is a portability trap in the other direction: a statement written against this product may not run against the sibling type-id, and the shared generateTableQuery() output is exactly such a statement (§5.4).
  • A double-quoted identifier is silently wrong. SELECT "customer" returns the literal string, and WHERE "customer" = 'acme' compares two literals and answers 0 rows with no error. The codebase's own quoter emits backticks for this dialect (identifier.ts:36), but a hand-typed statement has no such protection (§5.4).
  • There is a paging ceiling. A statement whose result the engine spreads over more than MAX_PAGES = 1000 pages is refused rather than truncated, after the cursor is closed (§3.5).
  • No writes reach documents, and DELETE — the one mutation in this grammar — is off by default (§5.6). A field's type cannot be altered in place even outside SQL.
  • No positional parameters, refused rather than inlined (§3.11).
  • No cancelQuery. An abort bounds this client's wait; the cluster finishes the statement (§3.8).
  • Performance metrics are empty, and this one is reachable: the numbers exist on this product's stats endpoints, so widening the seam by one call is the concrete follow-up (§7).
  • ssl.caCert / ssl.clientCert / ssl.rejectUnauthorized are not honoured, which matters more here than for most providers because a default distribution ships a self-signed certificate (§4.3).
  • No connection string, deliberately (§4.2).
  • A type the engine maps but its SQL surface cannot read is still listed as a column, because the mapping does not say which types SQL supports, and enumerating them would be a per-version list this code cannot verify (introspect.ts:46-52).
  • The whole result body is buffered before it is parsed (§3.1).

14. References