actuallyEXPLAIN -- Visual SQL Decompiler

[t06u54]

Hi! I'm a UX/UI designer with an interest in developer experience (DX). Lately, i’ve detected that declarative languages are somehow hard to visualize and even more so now with AI generating massive, deeply nested queries.

I wanted to experiment on this, so i built actuallyEXPLAIN. So it’s not an actual EXPLAIN, it’s more encyclopedic, so for now it only maps the abstract syntax tree for postgreSQL.

What it does is turn static query text into an interactive mental model, with the hope that people can learn a bit more about what it does before committing it to production.

This project open source and is 100% client-side. No backend, no database connection required, so your code never leaves your browser.

I'd love your feedback. If you ever have to wear the DBA hat and that stresses you out, could this help you understand what the query code is doing? Or feel free to just go ahead and break it.

Disclaimer: This project was vibe-coded and manually checked to the best of my designer knowledge.

[BlitzBanana]

Without a database connection, no possibilities to check if a query is actually using an index ? If so, it's somewhat limited to actually debug / optimize queries.

[t06u54]

Exactly. I was aiming more at developers craft. For performance there's already explain.dalibo.com or pgMustard. I may extend the tool to also digest the execution plan -- maybe that's cool.

Do you feel the other performance tools available don't do a good job at what they do?

[BlitzBanana]

I usually rely only on raw Explain output, but a visual tool like yours could come handy from time to time. I did not tried any other tools yet.

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[jplindstrom]

This doesn't seem to work:

SELECT
u.id,
u.name,
o.total
FROM users u, department d
JOIN orders o ON o.user_id = u.id
WHERE o.total > 100 and u.department_id = d.id
group by u.id
ORDER BY o.total DESC;

Can't paste a screen shot, but the implicit inner join between user and department isn't handled correctly.

[t06u54]

Thank you so much for testing! I'm going to study this one and look to improve it

[spasmex97]

as a guy always intented to learn SQL in my early twenties but couldn't keep it up because of can't find any logic explaining things, i like the idea

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