QUERY PLAN VISUALISER

An interactive tool that turns Postgres EXPLAIN ANALYZE output into a navigable cost graph, making the one missing index hiding behind a sequential scan impossible to miss.

The problem

Query plans are dense, nested text. The expensive node is in there somewhere, but finding it means parsing a wall of output by eye — exactly the kind of thing humans are bad at and tools are good at.

Approach

• Parse the plan into a tree and render it as a WebGL cost graph, sized by actual time.
• Highlight the dominant node and the rows-removed-by-filter smell automatically.
• Shareable URLs so a plan can be dropped into a code review.

Results

2.1k GitHub stars, a long tail of fixed queries, and an average 11× speedup on the plans people brought to it.