db-mcp

Read-only database access for AI agents, as a local stdio MCP server. One uniform surface over Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch, across multiple environments (dev, staging, prod, …).

Companion to agent-workbench, which deliberately holds no credentials and makes no network calls — anything that needs either lives in a sidecar like this one.

Query-only, enforced in the server

Use whatever credentials you already have — the server itself guarantees nothing but reads go through. It never creates users, never touches grants, never runs DDL/DCL:

1. The statement guard: one statement per call; must start with SELECT/SHOW/DESCRIBE/EXPLAIN/WITH; every write/DDL/DCL keyword rejected after comment/string stripping; row limits enforced (default 100, cap 1000). Mongo allows only find/aggregate/count/distinct and walks aggregate pipelines recursively to reject $out/$merge (even nested in $lookup/$facet); Elasticsearch only ever issues _search/_mapping/ _cat requests with index names validated against path smuggling.

2. The session: connections are additionally set read-only where the store supports it (default_transaction_read_only on Postgres, SET SESSION TRANSACTION READ ONLY on MySQL) plus 30s server-side timeouts.

Related MCP server: Database MCP Server

Failures come back usable

A read-only server still wastes your time if a bad call hangs or a wrong guess tells you nothing:

• Every failure comes back as an answer. Whatever a driver raises is returned as a tool error against the id of the request that caused it. A reply the caller cannot match to its request is, from its side, the same as no reply at all — the call just never returns.

• Nothing runs unbounded. Server-side caps (statement_timeout, max_execution_time, maxTimeMS) bound execution, not a stalled socket or a cursor dripping one batch at a time — each getMore restarts the server's clock. Every engine also carries socket timeouts and a 35s client-side deadline, so a runaway call returns an error instead of hanging the session.

• A wrong column name comes back with the right ones. Unknown column 'DATE_CREATE' tells you the guess was wrong but not what to use, so the next attempt is another guess; SQL engines append the table's real columns (or the database's tables, for an unknown table) to the error.

• A mongo timeout on an {"$oid": …} filter says so. Extended JSON is not converted to an ObjectId here, so the match scans and finds nothing; the error names the $toString/$expr rewrite that works.

Prod is a separate tool. db_query covers non-prod envs (refuses env="prod"); db_query_prod is its own tool name so your harness can allowlist dev queries while prod keeps prompting for manual approval.

Setup

git clone <this-repo> db-mcp && cd db-mcp
# Python >=3.11 plus the three drivers — any venv/interpreter you like.
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt

mkdir -p ~/.config/db-mcp
cp config.example.toml ~/.config/db-mcp/config.toml
$EDITOR ~/.config/db-mcp/config.toml       # fill in read-only creds
chmod 600 ~/.config/db-mcp/config.toml     # the server refuses looser modes

# Claude Code (point it at whichever interpreter has the drivers)
claude mcp add --scope user db-mcp "$PWD/.venv/bin/python3" "$PWD/run_mcp.py"

Credentials live only in ~/.config/db-mcp/config.toml — never in this repo, never in the harness config, never in brain notes.

Tools

Query shapes: SQL string for postgres/mysql; JSON {"op": "find", "filter": …} for mongo (target = collection); JSON search body for es (target = index).

Tests

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests -v   # no network, no drivers required