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SQL-tap

Real-time SQL traffic viewer for PostgreSQL and MySQL

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sql-tap is a transparent proxy that captures SQL queries by parsing the PostgreSQL/MySQL wire protocol and displays them in a terminal UI. You can run EXPLAIN on any captured query. No application code changes needed — just change the port.

HN · launched Feb 14, 2026 · 233 upvotes (top 4%) · 0 views

Niche: network monitoring and diagnostics tools · 193 launches, 12 in the last 7 days ▼ -33% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags
  • Horizontal
  • Observability & eval
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

More like this: all 193 launches in network monitoring and diagnostics tools →

Could you build this?

Partial Creating a simple terminal dashboard is easy, but building a transparent proxy that parses PostgreSQL and MySQL binary wire protocols in real-time without breaking active client connections requires deep networking and protocol reverse-engineering.

What it would actually take: The core application is a network proxy built in Go, Rust, or C that intercepts raw TCP sockets between client and database. The hardest piece is accurately decoding the stateful, versioned wire protocols of both Postgres and MySQL (handling SSL handshakes, prepared statements, and connection pooling) without adding latency or crashing active sessions. It requires specialized knowledge of database internals, binary stream parsing, and terminal UI frameworks (like Bubbletea or Ratatui).

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: Envoy Proxy, sqltap, AWS dashboard, eBPF-based query monitoring

Concerns raised: Latency overhead of proxy, especially if not co-located with database, Extension model doesn't work with managed providers like RDS/Aurora, TLS handshake overhead on connections, React frontend adds unnecessary complexity to simple UI

Feature requests: Export metrics to Prometheus instead of custom UI, Support for filtering/reducing log volume without database config changes, Policy enforcement and tenant isolation capabilities, Default docker-compose integration for developer debugging

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 85 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #6 of 86 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 106 days after the earliest competitor.

  • BarSQL · ph · 2026-11-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.50
  • LinkedQL · hn · 2025-12-08 · 31 upvotes · similarity 0.46
  • shahrah · github · 2026-09-27 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.45
  • Tabelaro · ph · 2026-10-15 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
  • DSGuard · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • Client SQL · ph · 2026-09-21 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • ByeSQL · ph · 2026-11-09 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.44
  • pgquery · ph · 2026-11-06 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43

Related data

The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.