February 13, 2026
Tap to spill the SQL tea
Show HN: SQL-tap – Real-time SQL traffic viewer for PostgreSQL and MySQL
Devs cheer a plug‑and‑play window into your database, live
TLDR: SQL‑tap lets developers watch database queries live without changing code, and the community is hyped about the instant debugging power. The hottest debate: using proxies to shield credentials and monitor AI “agents,” with friendly tool plugs hinting that old‑school database monitoring is staging a comeback.
Hacker News just discovered SQL‑tap, a tool that sits between your app and your database and shows every query in real time—and the crowd went wild. The mood? Pure relief. One top vibe was the “no code changes” promise, with users swooning over an easy drop‑in that you point your app at and immediately start watching traffic in a retro, keyboard‑driven terminal UI. Think live play‑by‑play of what your app is whispering to Postgres or MySQL, plus quick “EXPLAIN” plans for why a query is slow.
But the real spice came from the agents era angle. Commenters argued it’s smarter to watch what AI agents and services actually run on your database than to read the code—cue a friendly tool flex as one dev plugged their own dbfor.dev. Another chimed in with a security twist: route users through the proxy so agents never see the real database password, predicting the comeback of old‑school “database activity monitoring”—only this time for AI workflows. Meanwhile, the rest of the thread clapped for “sick observability,” TUI nostalgia, and vim‑style shortcuts (yes, j/k to scroll), trading jokes like “tap that SQL” while fantasizing about catching rogue queries red‑handed. Consensus: this is a drop‑in debugger devs will actually try—whether for performance sleuthing or corralling over‑eager agents.
Key Points
- •SQL-tap provides a real-time SQL traffic viewer via a proxy daemon (sql-tapd) and a TUI client for PostgreSQL and MySQL.
- •It captures queries over the native wire protocol, allowing inspection, transaction viewing, and EXPLAIN/EXPLAIN ANALYZE without changing application code.
- •Installation options include Homebrew, Go install, building from source, and Docker with example configurations for Postgres and MySQL images.
- •Quick start shows running sql-tapd with driver, listen, upstream, and gRPC settings; point the app to the proxy port, then connect the TUI to :9091.
- •The proxy tracks prepared statements, parameters, transactions, execution time, rows affected, and errors; EXPLAIN requires a DSN via the DATABASE_URL (or -dsn-env).