Announcing the Explain Analyzer

Written by Written by Bryan Alsdorf 2 Comments on Announcing the Explain Analyzer

The explain statement can be an important tool for understanding how a query is being executed and what you can do to make it run better.  Although the output of EXPLAIN is relatively straightforward it can be confusing to inexperienced users or can be mangled by terminal wrapping.

To help with these problems as well as provide a pastebin for MariaDB developers to share explains during development we created The MariaDB/MySQL Explain Analyzer. This tool:

  1. Helps unmangle explains (both vertical and tabular format)
  2. Displays explains in an easy-to-read format.
  3. Highlights and provides explanations for some terms.
  4. Links to KB articles for different optimization techniques.
  5. (Optionally) Allows you to save the explain for sharing.

This is the first release so there are still improvements to make. If you have any suggestions, feature requests or bug reports please let us know.

For more information, please see this KB article.