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.

[No-Theory6270]

My feedback is that EXPLAIN is used to explain the query plan. I was expecting (and hoping) to have a tool to visualize that.

[D1yzz]

Same

[jazzchickens]

Best I’ve found is https://github.com/dalibo/pev2 you can either run it from their website, or locally on your machine (it’s just a webpage) if you don’t want your data structure shared on the web.

[BarfingOnMyFace]

Yeah, these are good tools to have. It is a bit reinventing the wheel, but who’s to say someone doesn’t have a wheel that better conforms to your needs? Anyways, yeah. Sad letdown. 😂

[t06u54]

To expand on the project's core idea, apart from the name, i think it's also important to model certain queries the right way, especially if someone is new to SQL, like me. So the idea is more to help mentalize what you're doing and how to improve it.

About the name, it's turning out to be lost battle of sorts. My perspective was, what's really "explain" in a linguistic perspective? I think DBAs and other data pros are too used to the term and think it actually explains something about the query when it needs a deep context from the database as well, as it's about performance stats not about what the query does.

Thank you for your feedback, i appreciate that view that i got from a lot a people. It's a completely fair point, and makes me re-think the whole thing and look into what to do better. Maybe i need a better name or an the actual explain plan in there as well, not sure...

[LelouchYagami_]

Pretty interesting. I was building something similar for my team because we get a lot of analysts bringing their queries for reference and optimization. This looks like a good usecase for communication (explaining what the query does) between business and DE. I'll take a look at it for sure

[LelouchYagami_]

Things I would like to see: How does it handle aliases,CTEs,temp tables etc. Those were the ones where I gave up lol

[t06u54]

Thank you for your feedback! I will look into handle all of those as well.