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Bringing psql’s \d to your web browser

Different database systems provide different ways to list or describe the things they hold. For instance, to find a particular table and column in MySQL, you run SHOW TABLES followed by SHOW COLUMNS FROM my_table. In SQLite, you do .tables and then .schema my_table. And in Postgres, the commands ared (for describe) followed by d […]

Each time you issue one of these commands in psql, you’re running a little local routine that constructs one or more SQL queries, sends them to execute on the server one by one, and stitches the results together into a nice little table. Having put together Neon’s serverless driver — which runs in environments that don’t offer raw TCP connections, such as web browsers — I was tasked to upgrade our web-based SQL Editor to make use of it. But I also noticed that much of the code was pretty repetitive: lots of basic string manipulation to assemble SQL queries, and some simple logic to interpret what came back.

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