Hacker Blogs
Work in progress: 15,409 of 181,233 sites checked so far, more every week · updated 2 Nov 2026Missing a blog? Tell us

Top all-time · #1849

A

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.

Visit the blog
81mentions?
42HN people?
2011–2026first – last linked?
Links on Hacker News per year · peak 27 in 2012

Records, paintings, writing, a podcast,and software.

Most-linked posts?

  1. Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016)
    8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2016-01-19
  2. Pev: Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer
    5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-02-11
  3. Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer (Pev)
    5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2016-01-24
  4. /pev/
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-03-03
  5. "DevOps is ruining my craft"
    3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-02-23
  6. /pev/
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-06-18
  7. Postgres Explain Visualizer
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-03
  8. Introducing JS.js
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-04-22
  9. Facebook Launches Google Ad Campaign to Raise Stock Price
    2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-05-22

What Hacker News says?

  1. > 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”
  2. Submitted Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer (2016) as a story · 612 points

    HN discussion
  3. I'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)”
  4. Submitted Postgres Query Plan Visualization as a story · 251 points

    HN discussion
  5. Cool 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)”
  6. Submitted "DevOps is ruining my craft" as a story · 50 points

    HN discussion
  7. I’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”
  8. Submitted Introducing JS.js as a story · 27 points

    HN discussion
  9. What 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?”
  10. Submitted NoSQL no more: let's double down with MoreSQL as a story · 20 points

    HN discussion
  11. This 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”
  12. Submitted What comes after TDD? Guilt Driven Development as a story · 11 points

    HN discussion
  13. Alternative that also works well: https://tatiyants.com/pev/#/plans

    Comment linking /pev/

    on “Postgres Explain Visualizer”
  14. Submitted NoSQL No More: Let's double down with MoreSQL as a story · 10 points

    HN discussion
  15. Heard 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”
  16. Submitted Hostile code bases as a story · 8 points

    HN discussion
  17. Inspired 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”
  18. Submitted Newly discovered Nostradamus works predict technology breakthroughs as a story · 7 points

    HN discussion
  19. I'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”
  20. Submitted Good Devs Don't Like Magic as a story · 7 points

    HN discussion
  21. Other 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?”
  22. Submitted GoDaddy Also Withdraws Support For Syria, Red Light Cameras, and Justin Bieber as a story · 6 points

    HN discussion
  23. That 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”
  24. Submitted Pev: Postgres ‘Explain’ Visualizer as a story · 5 points

    HN discussion
  25. An 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”
  26. Submitted Show HN: Fabrika, Opinionated Software Factory as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  27. I 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”
  28. Submitted Pev: Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion
  29. For visualizing EXPLAIN there is a cool tool: http://tatiyants.com/pev/

    Comment linking /pev/

    on “A Performance Cheat Sheet for PostgreSQL”
  30. Submitted Google introduces new language to replace English as a story · 4 points

    HN discussion

Search all of HN for tatiyants.com

Linked by the same people?