21 posts tagged with "mergestat"

We’re proud to announce that MergeStat has raised over $1.2m in pre-seed funding led by OSS Capital, with participation from Caffeinated Capital and prominent angel investors.

At MergeStat, our mission is to enable operational analytics for software engineering teams via powerful, open-source tooling and systems.

We believe there is tremendous value in connecting SQL with the systems used to build and ship software. Engineering organizations are often “black boxes” driven by intuition and gut-feel decisions. By enabling access to the processes and artifacts of software engineering as data, MergeStat helps organizations become data-driven in the ways most relevant to their needs.

Our PostgreSQL approach is based on applying SQL to the data sources involved in building and shipping software. SQL not only grants the ability to ask adhoc questions, but also brings compatibility with many BI, visualization, and data platforms.

We’re working with a variety of organizations using MergeStat to answer questions about the software-development-lifecycle, in the tools they prefer. To date, we’ve worked with teams using our SQL approach to answer questions around:

• Audit and compliance
• Code and dependency version sprawl
• Engineering metrics and transparency (DORA metrics)
• Code pattern monitoring and reporting
• Developer on-boarding
• Vulnerability reporting
• …and more

“MergeStat is bringing the lingua franca of data to code: applying SQL to the modern SDLC will unlock tremendous value for all software developers. We are greatly honored to partner with Patrick DeVivo on this important mission!”

– Joseph Jacks, Founder and General Partner at OSS Capital

Over the past year, MergeStat has grown into an amazing team with a growing open-source presence. We’re very excited for our next chapter, as we begin working with more organizations looking to answer questions about how their engineering teams operate.

Investors​

• OSS Capital (Joseph Jacks)
• Caffeinated Capital (Charlie Marsh)
• Zac and Jacob Smith
• Bruce Wang
• Justin Dignelli
• Rez Khan
• Elliott Rapaport
• Josue Lopez
• …and others

If you’ve spent any time around code, you’ll know that // TODO comments are a fact of life. They're a common pattern, regardless of how you feel about them! For instance, the Kubernetes codebase has over 2,000, and Linux has over 3,000.

In the MergeStat codebase, we use them as a low-effort way to track small, technical debt items. Sometimes, a future fix or refactor might not warrant a ticket (it’s too small and too specific to a piece of implementation detail), but it’s still worth making a note. TODO comments are a good fit for this because they are:

• Low effort - very easy to add and remove, just leave a comment in the code
• Safe from context switching - no need to switch into a ticketing system, stay in the editor and near the relevant code
• Tracked in version control - so you have a history and audit trail

We recently connected with Ivan Smirnov, CTO of Elude on this topic, and were excited to learn about his enthusiasm for tracking TODO comments 🙂. He shared that during his time at Google, there was an internal system which aggregated TODOs across codebases, as a way of surfacing parts of code worth returning to. He missed having a similar solution in his role at Elude.

Luckily, we were able to help with a MergeStat + Grafana based solution! Elude operates a self-hosted instance of MergeStat (using our Kubernetes helm chart), and connects to its PostgreSQL database with a Grafana instance. We collaborated on putting together a starting “TODO Tracker” dashboard, which is available in our examples as a Grafana export:

"Elude currently uses TODO comments as a low friction mechanism to track technical debt. MergeStat is the missing link that allows us to turn these comments into trackable, actionable tasks." – Ivan Smirnov, Elude CTO

The SQL involved looks something like this:

SELECT
    git_blame.line,
    git_blame.author_name,
    git_blame.author_email,
    git_blame.author_when,
    REPLACE(repos.repo, 'https://github.com/', '') AS repo,
    repos.repo || '/blob/main/' || git_blame.path || '#L' || git_blame.line_no AS url -- generate a link to the line in GitHub
FROM git_blame
INNER JOIN repos ON repos.id = git_blame.repo_id
WHERE git_blame.line LIKE '%TODO%'
ORDER BY git_blame.author_when ASC

and should be fairly easy to customize to different needs:

• Only apply to certain repos
• Filter out certain file paths by pattern
• Look for FIXME and BUG comments as well
• Parse out "assignees" (i.e. TODO(patrickdevivo))
• etc...

If you're interested in taking a look at your own // TODO comments, go ahead and try out a local instance of MergeStat!

Today we're excited to announce the availability of in-app SQL querying in the latest versions of MergeStat! 🎉

One of the more significant pain points noted by our early adopters has been the need for external tools to access the data MergeStat provides, even for simple, one-off queries. Many users (ourselves included) lean on existing data products such as Grafana, Metabase and Superset to consume MergeStat data (in dashboards, alerts and reports).

With the addition of our query interface (in the Queries tab of our management console), MergeStat users can now execute SQL directly in our app.

Query results can be copied or downloaded as CSV or JSON, for quick use in other tools and contexts. We believe this is a significant step-forward in our app's functionality, and will continue to invest in this area of our management console. Keep a lookout for additional features, including:

• Saved and examples queries
• Inline schema documentation and editor auto-completions
• Basic charting and data visualization
• Query execution history

It's important to note that as always, the MergeStat PostgreSQL database can be connected directly to by BI tools, desktop SQL clients, or SQL drivers.

Check out the latest MergeStat release to get started!

Today we're very happy to announce a new flavor of MergeStat! If you've been following our progress over the last year, you'll know that our mission is to enable operational analytics for software engineering teams. You'll also know that our approach has been heavily based on SQLite (and its virtual table mechanism) to bring data from git repositories (source code, metadata, the GitHub API, etc) into a SQL context for flexible querying and analytics.

This has enabled initial use cases in many interesting domains related to the software-development-lifecycle, from audit and compliance, to code querying, to release time metrics, to technical debt surfacing, and much, much more.

For the past several months, we’ve been working on an approach in service of this mission that uses a different mechanism for enabling that SQL context. That mechanism is based on syncing data into a Postgres database for downstream querying, vs using a local SQLite based approach.

This grants us two significant advantages:

1. More compatibility with the ecosystem of data (and BI/visualization) tools
2. Much faster query time for data spread across multiple API sources

More Compatibility​

We love SQLite, but the fact of the matter is that it’s much easier to integrate a data visualization or BI product (open-source or not) with a Postgres server (or Postgres compatible server) than with a SQLite database file. A central part of our mission has always been not just enabling SQL, but allowing our SQL solution to play well with the wide array of existing tools that companies, teams and individuals are already using.

We want anyone to be able to query MergeStat data from tools like Metabase, Grafana, Tableau, Superset, etc. Postgres compatibility takes us a step in that direction, and we’re already working with early users integrating their SDLC data with these types of tools, via MergeStat.

Faster Queries​

Our SQLite virtual-table based approach is an effective way to query a local data source (such as a git repository on disk). However, it begins to fall short when it comes to querying over large sets of data spread across many pages in a web API (or multiple APIs). What ends up happening is queries spend much more time waiting for HTTP requests to finish than actually executing SQL. This means at query time, the user is forced to wait for data collection to occur. Depending on the scope of the data involved, this can potentially take a very long time. With our new approach, data is synced and maintained in a background process, so that data collection (from potentially slow sources) occurs out-of-band from user queries.

What’s Next?​

Our SQLite approach isn’t going anywhere. We still intend to invest in that and continue building it into a valuable open-source CLI that anyone can use. It’s been renamed MergeStat Lite and now lives at mergestat/mergestat-lite.

Our new approach now lives at mergestat/mergestat. Our documentation has been updated to reflect these changes, and we couldn’t be more excited to share more in the coming days and weeks.

We have some great features planned, and will be spending more time showcasing various use-cases from our growing community.

For organizations using GitHub Enterprise, the GitHub audit log is now supported as a table in the MergeStat CLI, enabling SQL queries against audit log events 🎉. Check it out!

The new table-value-function is github_org_audit_log, and may be queried like so:

SELECT * FROM github_org_audit_log('mergestat') -- replace with your org name

and has the following columns (type is TEXT unless otherwise specified):

• id
• entry_type
• action
• actor_type
• actor_login
• actor_ip
• actor_location (JSON)
• created_at (DATETIME)
• operation_type
• user_login

This enables some interesting use-cases for GitHub enterprise users looking to monitor, alert and report on events from the GitHub audit log. We're working with some early users of this table, and will publish some guides and examples in the near future 🔜.

The JSON column (actor_location) can be accessed with the SQLite JSON operators.

SELECT actor_location->>'country' FROM github_org_audit_log('mergestat')

+----------------------------+
| ACTOR_LOCATION->>'COUNTRY' |
+----------------------------+
| United States              |
+----------------------------+
| United States              |
+----------------------------+
| Belgium                    |
+----------------------------+
| ...                        |
+----------------------------+

It's important to note the following from the GitHub API docs as well:

SQLite 3.38.0 (released 2022-02-22) added support for built-in JSON functions (no longer a compile-time option) and two new JSON operators, -> and ->>, similar to ones available in MySQL and PostgreSQL.

MergeStat is a SQL interface to data in git repositories, based on SQLite. As such, we can now take advantage of these new operators in our queries, wherever JSON data is returned.

brew tap mergestat/mergestat
brew install mergestat

package.json​

An easy source of JSON to start with is the package.json file present in most JavaScript/TypeScript codebases. Let's take a look at the one in the popular tailwindlabs/tailwindcss repo.

SELECT contents->>'name', contents->>'license' FROM files WHERE path = 'package.json'

+-------------------+----------------------+
| CONTENTS->>'NAME' | CONTENTS->>'LICENSE' |
+-------------------+----------------------+
| tailwindcss       | MIT                  |
+-------------------+----------------------+

Here we use contents->>'name' and contents->>'license' to pull out the name and license fields from the package.json JSON file.

Let's take this up a level, and look at at the name and license fields for all repos in an org where a package.json file is present. Sticking with tailwindlabs (and now adding a GITHUB_TOKEN when we execute the following):

-- CTE (https://www.sqlite.org/lang_with.html)
-- to select all the package.json files from repos in the tailwindlabs GitHub org
WITH package_json_files AS (
    SELECT
        name,
        github_repo_file_content('tailwindlabs', repo.name, 'package.json') AS package_json
    FROM github_org_repos('tailwindlabs') repo
)
SELECT
    name as repo_name,
    package_json->>'name',
    package_json->>'license'
FROM package_json_files
WHERE package_json IS NOT NULL

+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| REPO_NAME                   | PACKAGE_JSON->>'NAME'       | PACKAGE_JSON->>'LICENSE' |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss                 | tailwindcss                 | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| webpack-starter             | NULL                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss.com             | NULL                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-plugin-examples | NULL                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-intellisense    | root                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-playground      | NULL                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-custom-forms    | @tailwindcss/custom-forms   | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-typography      | @tailwindcss/typography     | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| heroicons                   | heroicons                   | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindui-vue              | @tailwindui/vue             | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| blog.tailwindcss.com        | tailwind-blog               | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindui-react            | @tailwindui/react           | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| heroicons.com               | NULL                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| play.tailwindcss.com        | play.tailwindcss.com        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| headlessui                  | headlessui                  | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwind-play-api           | NULL                        | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-aspect-ratio    | @tailwindcss/aspect-ratio   | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-forms           | @tailwindcss/forms          | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-line-clamp      | @tailwindcss/line-clamp     | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| tailwindcss-jit             | @tailwindcss/jit            | MIT                      |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+
| prettier-plugin-tailwindcss | prettier-plugin-tailwindcss | NULL                     |
+-----------------------------+-----------------------------+--------------------------+

We see that most repos with a package.json file also have a name, while some do not (NULL). All the declared licences appear to be MIT.

Dependencies​

Finally, let's take a look at all the dependencies declared in package.json files across (JavaScript/TypeScript) codebases in an org. This time, let's try on the freeCodeCamp GitHub org.

WITH package_json_files AS (
    SELECT
        name,
        github_repo_file_content('freeCodeCamp', repo.name, 'package.json') AS package_json
    FROM github_org_repos('freeCodeCamp') repo
    WHERE (primary_language = 'TypeScript' OR primary_language = 'JavaScript')
)
SELECT
    count(*),
    json_group_array(name) AS repo_names,
    dep.key
FROM package_json_files, json_each(package_json->'dependencies') dep
WHERE package_json IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY dep.key
ORDER BY count(*) DESC

This query will show the most frequently used dependencies within a GitHub org (as extracted from the dependencies JSON value of package.json files). Here are the top 10 results from the above query, on freeCodeCamp:

1. dotenv (35)
2. express (31)
3. body-parser (26)
4. react-dom (16)
5. react (16)
6. lodash (16)
7. cors (14)
8. mongoose (12)
9. chai (12)
10. passport (11)

We had a user looking for a way to track merged GitHub pull requests that were unapproved (when merged into a main branch). This is typically done with an "Admin Override" when merging a PR, or from loose branch protection rules allowing for unapproved merges into a branch.

Allowing repo administrators to merge without a review can be a useful shortcut for "emergency" hotfixes that avoid a potentially time-consuming code review cycle. This of course depends on the habits and culture of your engineering organization.

Too many unapproved merges, however, is probably a sign of something wrong (again, depending on the organization and codebase). For instance, a high volume of "emergency fixes" shipping without any review, or developers simply short-circuiting the review cycle to get code merged/deployed quickly.

Surfacing Unapproved, Merged PRs​

The following MergeStat query will list all unapproved pull requests merged into the main branch.

SELECT
    number,
    title,
    date(created_at) AS created_at,
    date(merged_at) AS merged_at, 
    author_login,
    review_decision,
    merged
FROM github_prs('mergestat', 'mergestat') -- set to your own repo
WHERE
    merged = true
    AND review_decision <> 'APPROVED'
    AND base_ref_name = 'main' -- set to your own branch
ORDER BY created_at DESC

This will yield a table that looks something like (in our web app):

If you'd like to know which GitHub users most frequently merge without an approval, you can run the following:

SELECT
    count(*), merged_by
FROM github_prs('mergestat', 'mergestat')
WHERE
    merged = true
    AND review_decision <> 'APPROVED'
    AND base_ref_name = 'main'
GROUP BY merged_by
ORDER BY count(*) DESC

which will display an ordered list of the most common "unapproved mergers" in a codebase.

Additional Ideas​

1. Filter by created_at or merged_at if you only care about recently merged PRs
2. Query for unapproved (and merged) PRs across an entire GitHub org (rather than a single repo)
3. Create a Slack/Discord bot that alerts when an unnapproved PR is merged, or shares a monthly report
4. Track in a dashboard (a line chart) to record instances over time

It's a new year, and a post listing the top 30 committers to the Blender project in 2021 was on the front-page of HN this morning.

Below is the list of top committers to the Blender project in 2021. The amount of commits obviously doesn’t mean much, but it’s a neutral metric to put limelight on people who made Blender possible last year.

As the post says, counting commits doesn't mean much alone, but it's a decent proxy for relative activity within a codebase. As a maintainer of the MergeStat project, a SQL interface to data in git, I wanted to show how to make a similar list for any repo, and take it a step further with some additional metrics.

Top 30 Contributors by Commit Count​

Replicating the list in the original blog post can be done with the following query:

SELECT
    count(*), author_name, author_email
FROM commits
WHERE parents < 2 -- ignore merge commits
AND strftime('%Y', author_when) = '2021' -- commits only authored in 2021
GROUP BY author_name, author_email
ORDER BY count(*) DESC
LIMIT 30

This yields a list of names (ordered and with counts) very similar to what's in the original post 🙂.

Adding Commit Stats​

The stats table allows us to also look at the number of files modified in each commit as well as LOC added or removed. We can join the stats table with commits to measure:

1. Total lines added by a contributor
2. Total lines removed by a contributor
3. Distinct files modified by a contributor

In addition to just counting the number of commits.

SELECT
    count(DISTINCT hash) AS commits,
    sum(additions),
    sum(deletions),
    count(DISTINCT file_path),
    author_name, author_email
FROM commits, stats('', commits.hash)
WHERE parents < 2 -- ignore merge commits
AND strftime('%Y', author_when) = '2021' -- commits only authored in 2021
GROUP BY author_name, author_email
ORDER BY count(*) DESC
LIMIT 30

Similar to counting commits, LOC added or removed doesn't mean much indepedently. Files modified (distinct files changed by an author over the year) is a bit more interesting - depending on the size/nature of a codebase, it could be a measure of how "deeply" involved a particular contributor is - i.e. someone who contributes to all aspects of the project, not just a subset of it.

Making Some Graphs​

Finally, by adding the --format csv flag to the mergestat command when executing the above queries, we can copy the output into a spreadsheet to make some charts.

These queries should be portable to your own repositories (or any other). Try them out in our web app or with our CLI.

When a project has more than a handful of regular contributors, it can be dificult to see a high level view of all the changes happening. I've felt this recently, even in a codebase that went from just 1 to 3 contributors - there's a lot going on every day, and cutting through the noise to understand the cadence of outward value is difficult.

I've found that using MergeStat to summarize progress has been a useful way to achieve aspects of this. For instance, simply knowing what PRs have merged in the past 7 days has been a valuable summary for us:

-- show me PRs that merged in the past 7 days
SELECT
   base_repository_name,
   title,
   number,
   url,
   author_login,
   created_at,
   merged_at
FROM (
   SELECT * FROM github_prs('mergestat/mergestat') UNION ALL -- replace with your repo
   SELECT * FROM github_prs('mergestat/another-repo') -- can be run across multiple repositories
)
WHERE
merged_at > date('now', '-7 days') -- replace with the time period you care about
AND merged = true

Pull Requests in this context are a sensible "unit of work" (for us) - whereas individual commits or files changed would be far too noisy. This query can be modified to your needs and you can run it with our CLI or in the web app. It uses our GitHub API integration (and will need an auth token).

We run this query in a weekly GitHub action that reports the results to a Slack channel. It's been a cool way to automate a summary of work done across several of our key repositories.

Unanswered issues and pull requests on GitHub repos are no fun, especially if you're the one asking for help 🙂. I've seen many projects making use of automation to close (or comment on) them, though folks have argued against that.

Regardless, identifying unanswered issues can be valuable, especially for maintainers to ensure they're addressing user concerns - or even for anyone looking for places to help.

You can use the MergeStat GitHub tables to identify stale issues or PRs in a repo (or even across many repos).

Stale Issues​

This will return the oldest 25 issues created more than 30 days ago, with no comments, that remain open.

SELECT
    title, author_login, comment_count, created_at, url
FROM github_repo_prs('uber-go/zap') -- replace with your repo
WHERE
    created_at < date('now', '-30 days') -- replace with how long you care about (https://www.sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html)
    AND (merged = 0 OR closed = 0)
    AND comment_count = 0
ORDER BY created_at ASC
LIMIT 25

(see example output)

Stale PRs​

SELECT
    title, author_login, comment_count, created_at, url
FROM github_repo_prs('mergestat/mergestat') -- replace with your repo
WHERE
    created_at < date('now', '-30 days') -- replace with how long you care about (https://www.sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html)
    AND merged = 0
    AND closed = 0
    AND comment_count = 0
ORDER BY created_at ASC
LIMIT 25

export GITHUB_TOKEN="my-github-token"
cat query.sql | mergestat -v

Considerations​

1. Maybe comment_count = 0 isn't good enough to indicate "staleness" - maybe finding issues/PRs where there are only comments from the original author, or where there are no comments from maintainers is more accurate.
2. The above queries can be joined with github_org_repos to see stale PRs and issues across an entire org, not just in a single repo.
3. Maybe you could produce a dashboard (charts) to track issue staleness and alert on it - an SLA on issue response time?

If you're interested in exploring these use cases, feel free to come say hi on our Slack or shoot us a note on Twitter.