SQL Explorer: web client for your LiteFS Cloud databases

[flyandre]

Hi there,

You may know that SQLite databases are files on the filesystem, so unlike Postgres or MySQL, you don’t have a connection string you can use to connect a SQL client running on your personal computer to your database running on a server. The simplest alternative for SQLite is to connect to the server using ssh and use the sqlite CLI.

Today we are releasing a web client for LiteFS Cloud databases. Now, if you are using LiteFS Cloud, you can query your SQLite databases straight from Fly.io.

To access it, go to the dashboard, click on the LiteFS Cloud menu item on the left sidebar and click on one of your clusters. Now just click on the Explore button of the database you wish to query:

And boom… Start writing your queries:

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We are still actively working on this, so please don’t hesitate to report bugs or any feedback you might have

[Zane_Milakovic]

really great!

Is there a roadmap for this?

For example, I want to suggest showing table names in the GUI. But curious how you are all viewing this internally as a product and how far your planning on taking it.

[benbjohnson]

Thanks! We don’t typically do roadmaps but rather try to do small iterations and get feedback from customers. I like the idea of showing the table names. That should be easy enough for us to pull and display from sqlite_master.

Showing additional info such as columns gets a little more tricky since SQLite stores the metadata as SQL. We’ll need to add a parser into the JavaScript side. SQLite uses a parser generator called Lemon so maybe we can extract something from there or we can transpile the SQLite C parser and extract the info.

[charsleysa]

@benbjohnson

Showing additional info such as columns gets a little more tricky since SQLite stores the metadata as SQL. We’ll need to add a parser into the JavaScript side. SQLite uses a parser generator called Lemon so maybe we can extract something from there or we can transpile the SQLite C parser and extract the info.

Another option is to use a PRAGMA query with the table_info function.
https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info

[Zane_Milakovic]

I would say you know way too much about sqlite, but I am for sure benefiting from your knowledge. Ty @benbjohnson, the work you and everyone at fly is doing is headed the way I have wanted to go for a long time with app development. I have not been this excited for infrastructure and app architecture design in years!

[benbjohnson]

@charsleysa

Another option is to use a PRAGMA query with the table_info function.

That’s a good idea. I didn’t realize that was an available PRAGMA.