<story><title>Show HN: Visualize SQL Queries</title><url>https://animatesql.com</url><text>My co-worker and I were debugging a SQL issue; having not seen SQL in two years, I embarrassed myself by confusing union vs. join. After this episode, I tried refreshing my SQL memory, but there are few websites that animate SQL for you. Most of them just have a series of images to help you visualize. There are a few tools that are quite good and robust (especially for large&amp;#x2F;complex use cases) but require installation and are too complex for my simple purpose.&lt;p&gt;So, just created a small tool to help visualise SQL. Most of the animations are just my understanding of how SQL works. Would love to know what you think? Do you also visualise some of the queries like that in your head? Any feedback would be gold. Btw you can also edit queries and see different results (but its a bit limited).&lt;p&gt;Have fun ;)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>bob1029</author><text>We have started looking at something along the same axis of &amp;quot;improving understanding of your queries&amp;quot;. Our product has nearly 10k SQL queries that need to be managed for each logical installation.&lt;p&gt;By converting a SQL query into an AST, you can start applying business logic to the actual syntax of the query. Put another way, you can query you queries. You can also run reports across &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; SQL to determine things like &amp;quot;show me everything in the product which references this table &amp;amp; column&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;Which queries reference a specific magic string constant?&amp;quot;. More advanced reports can be made too, such as &amp;quot;Which queries join tables A, B &amp;amp; C together?&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;We haven&amp;#x27;t taken it to the next step yet, but hypothetically we can go from AST back into SQL and start doing some super crazy shit like patching hand-written queries programmatically. Once something is in AST form, you are basically working with playdoh that another tool like LINQ (and a bit of recursion) can trivially cut through.</text></comment>
<story><title>Show HN: Visualize SQL Queries</title><url>https://animatesql.com</url><text>My co-worker and I were debugging a SQL issue; having not seen SQL in two years, I embarrassed myself by confusing union vs. join. After this episode, I tried refreshing my SQL memory, but there are few websites that animate SQL for you. Most of them just have a series of images to help you visualize. There are a few tools that are quite good and robust (especially for large&amp;#x2F;complex use cases) but require installation and are too complex for my simple purpose.&lt;p&gt;So, just created a small tool to help visualise SQL. Most of the animations are just my understanding of how SQL works. Would love to know what you think? Do you also visualise some of the queries like that in your head? Any feedback would be gold. Btw you can also edit queries and see different results (but its a bit limited).&lt;p&gt;Have fun ;)</text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ComodoHacker</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not sure a procedural visualization is appropriate for a declarative language like SQL. It can be misleading both on underlying concepts (sets and relations) and actual query execution.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d more like to see a visualization it terms of tuples, sets and operations on them leading to result set.</text></comment>