Show HN: DeepSQL – A self-hostable DBA agent for Postgres and MySQL

vvenkat971 2 days ago 14 commentsRead Article on deepsql.ai

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

Hi HN - I'm Venkat, founder of Stayflexi (YC), CMU CS grad and Ex-Oracle Query Engine team (patents in core databases)

DeepSQL started as an internal tool to stop our own databases from becoming the bottleneck they were becoming (13,000+ hotels in production). It worked well enough that we're releasing it.

DeepSQL is an AI agent that operates a database the way a senior DBA and Data Engineer would

1. Fixes slow queries (we cutdown DB spend by 4x) 2. Fixes DB bloat (blocks unnecessary schema changes, in vibecoded setup) 2. BI dashboards(we removed spend on tableau, retool and appsmith) 3. Security (We could redact access to sensitive, PII data to our employees) while engaging everyone in the org to interact with our database

How it works 1. Deepsql learns your data and relationships from your code base, rules and query logs 2. Deepsql agent has 20 background jobs that continuously monitor the schema changes, bottlenecks, and come up with solutions before the problem arises. (Schema bloat issues are irreversible) 3. Deepsql Brain has CLI and MCP surfaces that can directly work with Claude / Codex and Cursor. 4. Deepsql digest delivers the daily database health report. 5. Your team can connect to deepsql with their favourate surface areas - Web UI, CLI, MCP or Slack.

One line install: curl -fsSL https://install.deepsql.ai/install.sh | bash

For community support: https://discord.gg/duEJq7AeeG

Or just email me for expert level setup guidance venkat@stayflexi.com

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

50% Positive

Analyzed from 649 words in the discussion.

Discussion (14 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

docheinestages•about 1 hour ago

The landing page doesn't show a link to your GitHub. Despite mentioning "self-hostable", I genuinely thought it was closed-sourced. I doubt first-time users will trust a random tool and grant it database-level access with a curl command.

venkat971•about 1 hour ago

Great point and thanks for the feedback. We made it self-hostable so that data doesn't leave the premises. We haven't open sourced the code yet, but most likely we will head in that direction very soon.

mdasen•32 minutes ago

Is this an open source tool? Is it something we have to pay for? The site really doesn't tell me what I should be expecting.

venkat971•23 minutes ago

Sorry for the confusion. It's not opensource. For first few installs, we are offering free 3 months and free consulting service to setup the tool end to end at your org. Post that pricing will be based on AI tokens consumption with some standard monthly pricing (we are also exploring the pricing sweet spot)

I am happy to get connected over email venkat@deepsql.ai and share more details on pricing and deployment help.

vector_spaces•about 1 hour ago

> 2. BI dashboards(we removed spend on tableau, retool and appsmith)

Can you explain this in more detail? You saying that DeepSQL can create BI dashboards that makes Tableau and friends redundant -- are you talking about analytics dashboards consumed by business teams or more like db ops dashboards used by backend teams? Does the user prompt the agent for them, or does it build dashboards that it infers are needed?

venkat971•about 1 hour ago

Deepsql has built in BI dashboards server - You can ask agent to build any BI dashboard from the connected data sources (this can be used by your internal teams or you can even share the dashboard link with customers with password protection, just like how we would share the retool links).

venkat971•2 days ago

Deepsql doesn't replace your DBA, it gives your DBA super powers. In my org, when we had to decide on hiring a DBA, we chose building deepsql and empowered our senior engineer to handle the database tasks like a senior DBA.

For deployment help, pl email me at venkat@deepsql.ai

evanelias•about 1 hour ago

> cut database costs by 40%

Where does this number come from? It feels completely arbitrary.

venkat971•33 minutes ago

We did cut our overall DB spend by more than 3x. Our $9K spend drops to $3k - indexes not kicking in, rapid growth of log tables and schema bloat were the culprits. Also, we removed the retool and appsmith licenses, another $2k savings.

We worked with 6 YC companies who are running on Aurora postgres and worked through the inefficiencies of workloads - too many indexes (in some cases almost every column is indexed), over indexing significantly increases I/O ops (writes), this hidden costs are enormous for fully managed services like Aurora. In all these cases, we could safely come up with a plan to cut down their DB spend by more than 40%.

evanelias•12 minutes ago

My point is that the number will entirely vary for each user, depending on how many poor DB-related infra decisions they've made. Some users may save 99%, others may save almost nothing, right? So why say 40% here? Where did this number come from?

Personally, I will instantly distrust a new product claiming an exact number of 40% savings -- not even "up to 40%" or "over 40%", which would still be misleading, but less weird than claiming exactly 40%. Especially in the second line of the homepage, without any supporting link or information.

> we removed the retool and appsmith licenses, another $2k savings.

These aren't DB-specific tools though? Why would this count towards the savings?

> 6 YC companies [...] in some cases almost every column is indexed

If your savings math is based on very early-stage startups who made horrendously bad indexing mistakes, honestly that would reduce my trust even further. That said, I'm definitely not the audience for your product.

shenli3514•about 2 hours ago

This is an interesting product. Any comparison with other DBA tools? There are many tools can fix the slow queries, based on rule+statistics.

venkat971•about 2 hours ago

Deepsql doesn't require any predefined rules + stats, nor you need a DBA to operate it. It's an autonomous agent, that learns your business context, schema, join relationships and creates a mental map of everything (just like a DBA who joined your team). This we call it deepsql brain init stage. Once the init is done, it will then look at all slow queries workload, comes up with comprehensive suggestions of indexes, MVs etc. Other DBA tools might look at one query at a time, if we try to optimize one query at a time, we might over index.

Also, deepsql is intelligent in understanding the deployment type. Postgres standalone deployment is very different than Aurora postgres. Cost factors are quite different. Other DBA tools might ignore these factors - Hence they need well trained DBA to use them.

that_dba_guy•about 13 hours ago

So, does it help with context management or so called MemoryBank setup?

venkat971•about 8 hours ago

Yes, it has built in storage layer(Postgres and PGVector)