Watch a table

Watch a table when something else is supposed to be writing to it and you want to see it happen, such as a worker that should be inserting orders or a migration backfilling a column. The grid stays where it is and marks what changed since you pressed Watch. If you only want the grid to reload on a timer, the auto-refresh menu in the data grid does that without marking anything.

Start a watch

1. Right-click orders under commerce in the sidebar and choose Watch. In an open table tab, ⌘⌥W or CtrlAltW does the same, and so does Watch at the top of the toolbar's auto-refresh menu.
2. Look at the toolbar. The auto-refresh button is now the watch control: a dot that beats once per check, Watching · 1s, the counters +0 ~0 −0 and since 14:22:01.

The tab sorts by id, newest first, so new rows arrive at the top. A table without a numeric key is sorted by a column named like created_at instead, or keeps its order.

See rows arrive

Write some rows from somewhere else, your app or psql in a terminal.

INSERT INTO commerce.orders (customer_id, store_id, channel, total_cents)
SELECT 40213, id, 'web', 5400
FROM   commerce.stores ORDER BY name LIMIT 3;

On the 12-million-row sample the three orders get ids 12000001 to 12000003, with status at its default, pending. At the next check they appear at the top of the grid, tinted for a few seconds, each with a + in the gutter. The counters read +3 ~0 −0.

UPDATE commerce.orders SET status = 'paid' WHERE id = 12000001;
DELETE FROM commerce.orders WHERE id = 12000003;

The changed cell shows pending struck through beside paid for about six seconds. Order 12000001 keeps its +, because it is still new since the watch started. A row that existed before the watch gets a ~. The deleted order leaves the grid, and a strip above it reads −1 with 12000003 struck through. The counters read +3 ~1 −1.

Click the + or ~ in a row's gutter, or press ⌥Enter or AltEnter, to follow that row: a strip of how long it held each value, and its versions with their times.

Scrolled down, the rows hold still and a pill counts what arrived: ↑ 3 new.

Watch a whole schema

Right-click commerce, or its Tables folder, and choose Watch tables. A Watch · commerce tab opens with each table, a checkbox and its own + ~ − counts on the left. Up to 16 tables are watched at once.

On the right is the write tape, oldest first. Each line is one change: the time to a tenth of a second, the glyph, the table and key (orders 12000001), then up to three columns of an insert, status pending → paid for an update, or deleted. Changes split into bursts on a quiet gap of 1.5 s, with quiet 8.2 s between them. On PostgreSQL, rows written by one transaction share a dot on the spine, tx and its id on hover.

Mark starts a new burst by hand, and Name this burst labels one. Copy as fixtures copies the new rows as INSERT statements. Click a line to open its table filtered to that row. Writes Seqora made itself, from the grid or the SQL editor, are marked you.

Stop a watch

Click Watching · 1s for its menu: the interval, Pause, Since now, Pin… and Stop watching. Since now clears the marks and counts and starts again from the current page. ⌘⌥W or CtrlAltW stops it too, and so does closing the tab.

Pin a watch

Pinned watches are Pro. Choose Pin… in the watch menu or on the tape. The dialog sets which Changes count (inserted, updated, deleted), an optional Column becomes value such as status → refunded, a Filter the database applies, such as total_cents > 10000, and Every 30 s, 1 min, 5 min or 15 min.

A pinned watch keeps checking while Seqora is open, with its tab closed. A check that finds a match sends one notification and logs the matches, kept for 7 days and at most 10,000 entries. Pinned watches: <connection> in the command palette opens a Watches · <connection> tab with each watch, its rule, its last hit and its log. They live on your machine, not on the server, and stay readable if the license ends.

How it finds changes

Watching polls. Each check sends one probe per connection, asking whether anything was written since the last one. Only when the answer moves does Seqora fetch the grid's first page again, the same SELECT the grid runs, and compare it with the last one by primary key. On PostgreSQL the probe is:

SELECT txid_current_snapshot()::text;

A quiet table costs one probe per check, plus one fetch every 15 s in case the probe missed something. The interval never drops below ten times the last fetch time: a page that takes 400 ms is checked every 4 s at most. A connection named like production (Prod, prod-eu) is checked every 10 s at most. One check runs at a time per connection.