Show HN: FlowScope – Fast, sophisticated SQL lineage that runs in the browser

1 points by melonamin 4 months ago · 0 comments · 2 min read

I built FlowScope because existing lineage tools either required uploading SQL to external servers or couldn't handle real-world query complexity. FlowScope does both: it's a serious lineage engine that happens to run entirely client-side.

The engine is genuinely powerful:

- Full multi-statement analysis tracks lineage across CTEs, subqueries, temp tables, and cross-file references

- Column-level lineage with expression decomposition (not just "column A depends on table B")

- Backward inference — figures out SELECT * columns from downstream usage even without schema

- Type inference with dialect-aware compatibility checking

- Handles lateral column aliases, COPY/UNLOAD statements, table renames, and other edge cases that trip up simpler parsers

It's fast:

- Rust core compiled to WebAssembly — analyzes hundreds of files in milliseconds

- Graph layout runs in web workers so the UI never blocks

- Serve mode watches your SQL directory and re-analyzes on save with 100ms debounce

Multi-dialect, multi-format: - PostgreSQL, Snowflake, BigQuery, DuckDB, Redshift, MySQL, and more

- Native dbt/Jinja support with ref(), source(), config(), var() — not regex hacks

- Exports to Mermaid, JSON, Excel, CSV, HTML reports, or DuckDB for further analysis

Multiple interfaces:

- Web app at flowscope.pondpilot.io — interactive graphs, drag-and-drop

- CLI — flowscope -d snowflake -f mermaid *.sql for CI/CD pipelines

- Serve mode — flowscope --serve --watch ./models --open gives you a full local web UI in a single 15MB binary

- TypeScript/React packages — embed the engine or visualization in your own tools

The CLI can introspect live databases (--metadata-url postgres://...) for accurate wildcard expansion against your actual schema.

Reusable Rust core and React components. Zero data egress. Apache-2.0 licensed.

VS Code extension in work.

GitHub: https://github.com/pondpilot/flowscope Try it: https://flowscope.pondpilot.io

What SQL patterns does your lineage tooling struggle with? I'm curious what edge cases I should tackle next.

No comments yet.