Fauna Schema Language quick start

This introduces you to the Fauna Schema Language (FSL) by using the Dashboard to view and change the demo data schema.

While you can use the Dashboard to manage and change schema, in practice, you want to integrate schema operations with your source code management tools, which you can do using the Fauna Shell.

Browse the schema in the Dashboard

This uses the Fauna demo data to walk you through basic operations on the supported schema elements.

If you haven’t already done so in Dashboard quick start, go to the Dashboard Home page and click the CREATE DATABASE button. Otherwise, skip to the next step.

In the Create Database dialog, enter a Name for the database and select Use demo data. This example uses fslDemo as the database name. You can leave all other options in their default state.
Click the CREATE button to create the database.
In the Databases panel, select the demo database you created to view it in the database Explorer page. On the bottom-left of the page, you can see the database entities supported by FSL:

The schema elements are shown in the header:
- Collections
- Functions
- Roles
- Access Providers
  
  The Collections entity is selected by default, and the demo data collections are also listed.
In Collections, choose the Customer collection to view the schema for that collection. The three demo data customer Documents are also listed, but FSL doesn’t yet support Documents:

In the Dashboard Shell window on the right, you can see the schema defined for the Customer collection:

The collection has a name, Customer, an index, and unique constraint defined.
For another collection example, click Product and view the schema for Product in the Dashboard Shell on the right:

A unique constraint is defined, and more indexes. In addition to the history_days and ttl_days fields, index and unique constraint are the other Collection properties supported by FSL.
To view a function schema, choose Functions in the header and select f(x) inventory:

In the Dashboard Shell, you can see the function schema.

The schema includes the function name, inventory, function parameter, and the full function body.

Functions can also include an annotation, @role, which is a way to assign a role to a function using FSL notation. In this example, the inventory function runs with the server role.