Zing! Poof! Bam! Let’s explore this database, composing queries that make sense, one step at a time, with feedback after each keystroke.
Start typing the name of a table or column. See the names of the matching tables, along with their data. Tab, type another, see them together. See likely candidate join columns highlighted, with quick keystrokes to select them.
Behind the scenes, the database explorer is shitting out hundreds of queries a second and pulling a few rows from each one, using multiple different worker threads in case one of the queries is unresponsive.
An operand stack is displayed, updated after each keystroke. Available keystroke commands apply to the top stack items, but shuffling them around is easy. Since each value on the stack is an entire relation (associated with the expression that produced it) it can occupy potentially much more space than you have on your screen. The displayed summary includes the most common values in each column and, in some cases, other presentations such as maps for geodata.
As you type them, numbers and literal strings are incrementally searched for at the beginnings of all indexed columns and, if time permits, unindexed columns too.
The interface is modeless, so all the command (“accelerator”) keys are modified with control or alt, and the available commands are always displayed in the UI.
Once you have the query you want, you can convert it to SQL.