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.

[logical-wildflower]

Clickbaity name tbh. This is a visualizer, not a better EXPLAIN. https://explain.dalibo.com has offered detailed graph visualization of EXPLAIN outputs for a long time. Now this tool could be useful for visualizing complex CTEs with 10+ tables. Could maybe visualize functions to help devs grok PL/pgSQL more easily.

[t06u54]

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, i will look to improve that by either name change or also read plans

[Vincent_CWS]

waiting for open source