QueryScope: Visualizing queries for repeatable database tuning

Abstract

Reading and perceiving complex SQL queries has been a time consuming task in traditional database applications for decades. When it comes to decision support systems with automatically generated and sometimes highly nested SQL queries, human understanding or tuning of these workloads becomes even more challenging. This demonstration explores visualization methods to represent queries as graphs. We developed the QueryScope tool to help visualize and understand critical elements of a query, thereby cutting down the learning curve. We show how the tool allows the user to drill down on particular queries or to find similarly structured queries that may exhibit similar tuning opportunities. The queries shown in the demonstration are taken from real tuning engagements. © 2008 VLDB Endowment.