Query Insights

Which queries you run most, which cost the most time, and which got slower

A query you ran 400 times with 400 different ids is one row here, not 400. That regrouping is what turns a list of what you ran into a ranking of what is worth looking at. Every number on the page is computed on your Mac from the query history already stored there, and none of it is uploaded.

Needs a Starter license.

Open it from Database > Query Insights. It opens as a tab, one per connection, and reuses the tab you already have open.

Query Insights: summary, activity chart, and the ranked panels below it

The panels

Each ranked panel lists the top 10 shapes. Right-click a row for Copy Query and Load in Editor: both give you the most recent real query in the group, values and all, from a run the row is actually counting, so the connection, sources and date range you picked all apply. In Failures it comes from the run that produced the error beside it.

Summary

Across the top: how many queries ran, what share failed, the average duration, and the total time spent waiting.

Activity

Queries per day, split into succeeded and failed. A range of two days or less is charted by hour instead.

Most Run

Shapes ranked by how many times they ran.

Slowest

Ranked by Total Time by default, which finds the query that actually costs you time: usually a quick one you run constantly rather than a slow one you ran once. Switch Rank By to Average Time for the query that is slow every time. Average Time lists only shapes that ran at least 3 times.

Got Slower

Compares the range you picked against the range immediately before it, so Last 7 Days compares against the 7 days before that. An unbounded range compares the last 7 days. A shape is reported when all three hold:

• it ran at least 5 times in both periods
• its average got at least 50% slower
• its average grew by at least 25 ms

Only successful runs count. Rows are ordered by the time the slowdown actually costs, so a query that got twice as slow and runs all day ranks above one that got ten times slower and runs twice.

Failures

Shapes ranked by how many times they failed, with the most recent error message for each.

What to do with a finding

A row in Slowest or Got Slower is a shape, not a diagnosis. Load in Editor puts a real example in a query tab, where Cmd+Option+E gives you the execution plan: see Explain Visualization.

Durations are measured on this side of the wire, from sending the query to getting the result, so they cover network time and any SSH tunnel as well as the server. For server-side timings, locks and running queries, see the Server Dashboard.

A shape ranked high under Table Browsing came from the app paging or sorting a table, not from anything you wrote.

How shapes are grouped

Values are stripped out of every statement and what is left is the shape:

Written	Counted as
WHERE id = 1 and WHERE id = 2	WHERE id = ?
IN (1, 2) and IN (1, 2, 3, 4)	IN (…)
VALUES (1, 'a') and VALUES (1, 'a'), (2, 'b')	VALUES (…)
select * from t and SELECT * FROM t	one shape
the same query with and without comments	one shape

This is the same idea as PostgreSQL’s pg_stat_statements and MySQL’s statement digest, so the numbers mean what they mean there.

Two things stay apart: table and column names keep their capitalization, since Orders and orders are different tables on a case-sensitive server, and a number inside a name stays part of it, so events_2025 and events_2026 are counted separately.

Filtering

Control	What it does
Scope	This connection, or all connections
Source	Which parts of the app the queries came from
Date	Last hour, today, last 7 days, last 4 weeks, all time

Source defaults to My Queries, the SQL you wrote yourself, and uses the same source list as the history drawer. Date defaults to Last 4 Weeks rather than All Time, since “got slower than before” needs a before to compare against. There is no outcome filter.

Insights refreshes as you run queries. The refresh button is for when you want it now.

What it cannot tell you

It knows what your Mac recorded and nothing else. Queries run before you installed the app, run by other people, or run while capture was paused are not in it, and neither are queries already pruned by your retention settings. All Time never reaches further back than retention allows.