Top all-time · #1712
Alex Tatiyants
Personal blog · tatiyants.comprogrammingcareer
Alex Tatiyants's personal blog at tatiyants.com covers programming and career. Since 2011, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 81 times, most often “Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (26) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alex Tatiyants's posts on visualising Postgres EXPLAIN plans, mainly his Postgres Explain Visualizer (PEV) tool, which commenters use when tuning queries.
- Recommended for · 6 comments
- Commenters call the PEV tool 'the best tool I know', say 'I'm a big fan', 'works well', and that it gives a clear, convenient view of EXPLAIN plans.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 26 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Records, paintings, writing, a podcast,and software.
Most-linked posts?
- Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016)8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-01-19
- Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer (Pev)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-24
- Pev: Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-02-11
- "DevOps is ruining my craft"3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-02-23
- /pev/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-03
- Introducing JS.js2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-22
- Facebook Launches Google Ad Campaign to Raise Stock Price2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-22
- /pev/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-18
- Postgres Explain Visualizer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-03
What Hacker News says?
> Hence, no tree-of-objects database engine provides the level of detail in their "EXPLAIN" output that SQLite provides. I've seen some cool graphical visualisation tools for postgres http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/
Comment linking /postgres-query-plan-visualization/
on “Why SQLite Uses Bytecode”Submitted Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016) as a story · 612 points
HN discussionI've had many similar experiences with Postgres. I always seem to be the one adding the query logging to the apps. Then I feed the prod queries into the query planner. Then run the results through this tool: http://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans/new Tweak the queries, add/remove indexes. Voilà.
Comment linking /pev/
on “Rob Pike's Rules of Programming (1989)”Submitted Postgres Query Plan Visualization as a story · 251 points
HN discussionCool project. Not a DBA but was interested in playing around with this. Be great to maybe add some example plans here: http://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans So if you just want to checkout the interface you can click to load up an example or two.
Comment linking /pev/
on “Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016)”Submitted "DevOps is ruining my craft" as a story · 50 points
HN discussionI’d start w ‘EXPLAIN query’, if you arent familiar with the output there, you can put it on PEV and get a visualization. https://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans
Comment linking /pev/
on “An early look at Postgres 14: Performance and monitoring Improvements”Submitted Introducing JS.js as a story · 27 points
HN discussionWhat helped me a lot getting away from being limited by ORM capabilites while on the job: - Get the raw SQL of some slow or memory intensive queries the ORM produces and try to optimize them by hand. Try different approaches to get the same result, measure and understand them by using 'explain' and visualizers like http://tatiyants.com/pev/ This works great together with libraries like sqlalchemy where the ORM is op…
Comment linking /pev/
on “Ask HN: What Technologies to Learn in 2020?”Submitted NoSQL no more: let's double down with MoreSQL as a story · 20 points
HN discussionThis is the best tool I know, works pasting only the JSON output: http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/ The information density the rendering gives me is way better than the flamegraph.
Comment linking /postgres-query-plan-visualization/
on “Show HN: pg_flame – flamegraph visualizations of PostgreSQL query plans”Submitted What comes after TDD? Guilt Driven Development as a story · 11 points
HN discussionAlternative that also works well: https://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans
Comment linking /pev/
on “Postgres Explain Visualizer”Submitted NoSQL No More: Let's double down with MoreSQL as a story · 10 points
HN discussionHeard of depesz; haven't used it. I rather like the PostgreSQL Explain Vizualizer. [1] I can keep multiple plans around, and it has a lot of detail. [1] http://tatiyants.com/pev [2] https://github.com/AlexTatiyants/pev
Comment linking /pev
on “PostgreSQL's Explain Analyze Made Readable”Submitted Hostile code bases as a story · 8 points
HN discussionInspired from it you also have pev if you prefer something more visual : http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/
Comment linking /postgres-query-plan-visualization/
on “PostgreSQL's Explain Analyze Made Readable”Submitted Newly discovered Nostradamus works predict technology breakthroughs as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI've enjoyed using pev[1]. It's based on this tool but lays out the plan graphically. [1] http://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans/plan_1550754076978
Comment linking /pev/
on “PostgreSQL's Explain Analyze Made Readable”Submitted Good Devs Don't Like Magic as a story · 7 points
HN discussionOther tips: - Change the field type from JSON to JSONB (better storage and the rest) https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/datatype-json.html -Learn the json in-build functions and see if one of them can replace one you made ad-hoc - Seriously, replace json with normal tables for the most common stuff. That alone will speed up things massively. Maybe keep the old json around in case, but remove when it become old(?) -…
Comment linking /pev/
on “Ask HN: What problem are you close to solving and how can we help?”Submitted GoDaddy Also Withdraws Support For Syria, Red Light Cameras, and Justin Bieber as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThat page yields a 504 Gateway Time-out right now. Cached at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:jH9Wl8R... The demo at http://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans works. Unfortunately it has some glitches. Hints for using it: * In psql use \o plan.txt to redirect the output of explain to a file. It will be a long output because you must use EXPLAIN (ANALYZE, COSTS, VERBOSE, BUFFERS, FORMAT JSON) and copying i…
Comment linking /pev/
on “Postgres Query Plan Visualization”Submitted Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer as a story · 5 points
HN discussionAn alternative to https://explain.dalibo.com/ is https://tatiyants.com/pev Both have pros and cons about how they visualize things.
Comment linking /pev
on “PostgreSQL EXPLAIN Output Explained”Submitted Show HN: Fabrika, Opinionated Software Factory as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI am for one excited it is available as a "web" app and are going in a new direction. PGadmin was functional, I'll give it that, but it paled in comparison to MySQL's tools. If this can speed up development and make it better then I'm all for it. Maybe they could integrate this[1] into it? 1. http://tatiyants.com/postgres-query-plan-visualization/
Comment linking /postgres-query-plan-visualization/
on “PgAdmin 4 v1.0 released”Submitted Pev: Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer as a story · 4 points
HN discussionFor visualizing EXPLAIN there is a cool tool: http://tatiyants.com/pev/
Comment linking /pev/
on “A Performance Cheat Sheet for PostgreSQL”Submitted Google introduces new language to replace English as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
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