The Postgres Playground: BYOS (Bring Your Own SQL)
The Postgres playground started with a fun idea of "I wonder if I can put Postgres in a web browser". It evolved to a full set of guided tutorials that you can follow along step by step with. We actually use Notion to power all of our tutorials and an in-house API. This means a new tutorial is as simple as some SQL and some markdown. But, did you know you can bring your own setup to the playground?
Just Postgres in a browser
All of our curated tutorials exist directly on the main Crunchy Data Developer area. However, you can visit an empty Postgres playground directly at: https://www.crunchydata.com/developers/playground. This is a blank slate Postgres instance, utilizing compute and memory directly from your web browser. It is not persistent and not connected to a remote session.
Creating your own SQL files
If you pass in a parameter for a sql
file it, the playground will automatically run that once the Postgres session is started.
We can take a very basic set of SQL, something like this:
CREATE TABLE example (
id serial,
data text);
INSERT INTO example (data) VALUES ('hello');
INSERT INTO example (data) VALUES ('world');
You can build longer SQL files for full data inputs. If you run a pg_dump from an existing database, that file will also work.
Like a restore file, you can also list SET statements for the session
SET statement_timeout = 0;
SET lock_timeout = 0;
SET idle_in_transaction_session_timeout = 0;
SET client_encoding = 'UTF8';
SET standard_conforming_strings = on;
SET check_function_bodies = false;
SET xmloption = content;
SET client_min_messages = warning;
SET row_security = off;
Load your SQL file into a url
The easiest way to host a sql file online is to use the GitHub gist feature. You’ll create a new gist, give it a name. Then view the raw link. The raw view link is the URL we want for working with the playground.
My example my file is:
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/craigkerstiens/62e00c80df31700302726f77595b7661/raw/3aa83426c148ac77bbed0f80ef31f433cf7e5053/example.sql
Build your own playground URLs
Now we can pass that into the playground and build a longer url with:
1 - The base playground URL: https://www.crunchydata.com/developers/playground
2 - The sql parameter ?sql=
3 - Your full gist URL https://gist.githubusercontent.com/craigkerstiens/62e00c80df31700302726f77595b7661/raw/3aa83426c148ac77bbed0f80ef31f433cf7e5053/example.sql
Resulting in this:
https://www.crunchydata.com/developers/playground?sql=https://gist.githubusercontent.com/craigkerstiens/62e00c80df31700302726f77595b7661/raw/3aa83426c148ac77bbed0f80ef31f433cf7e5053/example.sql
I’ve been really excited to see how many people are using the Postgres playground for education and training. Let us know how you’re using the playground on X @crunchydata.
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