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Spawnfest - Kino Ecto (fka Lively)

It’s fall and that means Spawnfest! I’ve appreciated this event for a while but haven’t had the chance to participate before.

If you’re not aware, Spawnfest is a fun BEAM based hackathon.

SpawnFest is an annual 48 hour online software development contest in which teams from around the world get exactly one weekend to create the best BEAM-based applications they can. Special sponsorship brackets also exist for specific uses of BEAM-based technology.

Lively (-> kino_ecto)

Me and some lovely folks (👋 Filipe, Vittoria, and Thiago) teamed up to hack on Lively. The initial idea was to build a nice Entity Relationship visualization of Ecto schemas for livebook. We managed to do that, and also some other really cool stuff!

Lively got a bit of attention right away thanks to Filipe’s tweet about it. Even José Valim commented on it and suggested a name change. The continuation of the project now lives on as: kino_ecto. Before the hackathon ended we had a collection of Ecto related utilities for livebook. Of course it’s very much WIP/hackathon level code but the ideas are very interesting. Please check it out.

In this post I’ll go in depth into the KinoEco.Explain functionality.

SQL Explain

When trying to understand and debug slow queries explain is your best friend. Naturally Ecto got you covered as well - Ecto.Adapters.SQL.explain/4.

Understanding the output from explain can be challenging though. To me a tool like explain.dalibo helps immensely. But using dalibo requires uploading your plan to a third party. It makes the process a little slow, and might not always be a good idea.

What if you could get a nice, graphic visualization of a query explanation right inside livebook?

KinoEcto.Explain

The KinoEcto API may change, there’s no stable release yet.

Enter KinoEcto.Explain! If you connect to an elixir node with kino_ecto added you can visualize a query simply by doing: KinoEcto.explain(MyApp.Repo, :all, my_ecto_query)

KinoEcto.Explain in action

As you can see the output is inspired a lot by explain.dalibo :)

Now having lively installed on you production app might not be a great idea, but at least we can use it locally when debugging slow queries. What if we want to use a plan from production and render it in our local livebook? First we need to get a plan in a good format, here’s the options I recommend for postgres:

opts = [
    analyze: true,
    verbose: true,
    costs: true,
    settings: true,
    buffers: true,
    timing: true,
    summary: true,
    format: :map
  ]


plan = Ecto.Adapters.SQL.explain(MyApp.Repo, :all, myquery, opts)

Now we can copy the plan to our local livebook and render it with KinoEcto.Explain.Postgres.new(plan).

There’s a couple of things KinoEcto.Explain relies on to be able to build the graph:

  • This is the biggest one: PostgreSQL ability to output the plan in a structured format. Sadly KinoEcto.Explain doesn’t work with any of the other Ecto SQL adapters yet. I would love to fix that, and have started work on supporting MyXQL (issue).
  • Mermaid graphs in markdown. Mermaid is so powerful, you can build all kinds of complex graphs. For explain we’re using the flowchart variant.

High level flow:

  1. Get explain output in structured format
  2. Parse into a tree struct that keep the interesting bits (KinoEcto.Explain.Postgres.Node.build_tree/1)
  3. Convert the tree into a top to bottom mermaid flowchart (KinoEcto.Explain.Postgres.Renderer.build_mermaid_graph/1)
  4. Render to to livebook (KinoEcto.Explain.Postgres.Renderer implements Kino.Render)

Available information on the nodes:

  • Basics (node type, details)
  • Metadata (cost, timing, rows)
  • Warnings (heuristics, row under/over estimation only for now)

Next steps for KinoEcto.Explain

Who knows really, but here’s some things I’d like to do.

  • Add a new warning for high % cost nodes
  • Restructure code a bit to make it more consistent with the other utilites in Lively
  • Take a look at Kino.JS and/or Kino.JS.Live as replacements for the mermaid graph. While mermaid is really awesome it feels like it has some limitations, especially for the content rich nodes we need.
  • Support for other Ecto adapters beside PostgreSQL

All in all I had a blast, learned a ton. Much love to the organizers, sponsors, and of course my awesome team mates!

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