‘History’ is difficult to find in the lower panel. Users tended to look for it at the top of the window. We believe this might be because the lower panel includes 4 tabs - ‘Data Output’, ‘Explain’, ‘Messages’, and ‘History’ - and the grouping of the four makes it difficult to see how each is related.
We also learned that once a query within the history panel is expanded, it should be easier to switch from one query to the next.
Actions
Rename ‘History’ to ‘Query History’
Provides more context on what the history will show
Removes confusion that ‘History’ might be showing ‘Data Output’ history
Remove ‘Explain’ and ‘Messages’ from bottom panel
4 tabs are not providing the same level of information even though they are visually displayed with the same significance
‘Explain’ is more relevant in other areas, like within ‘Data Output’ or perhaps another window. It should be shown when the user actively chooses to see this view rather than be shown by default.
‘Messages’ are included with data in ‘History’
I disagree. I use both the Explain and Messages tabs all the time, and rarely the History tab. You cannot easily merge the data output and EXPLAIN tabs because they show complementary information.
The Messages tab is used to quickly show the full set of messages from the last executed query. Having that info only on the results tab is less useful for a number of reasons:
- It shows the results from all queries, thus making the display more cluttered when you're only interested in the results of the last query (which is probably the majority of the time).
- It shows information above and beyond the messages, again, cluttering the display and detracting from the message info.
- It shows only 1 line at a time, where messages are typically multi-line. This would mean that either the user has to expand the row to see the results, or we'd have to do it programmatically which could interfere with rows the user has intentionally expanded.
‘Data Output’ and ‘History’ should be grouped together because the two tabs show results based off of what was typed in the query editor
Iterate on ‘History’ to have full query expand to side.
Enables quicker browsing through the ‘Query History’
Example whiteboard sketch
If the user wants that, they can do it already. I would argue in most cases users likely want to have the entire width available for query results, which often need more space than is available at present as it is.
Please ensure you're talking not just to users that query data, but to those developing stored procedures as well - they likely have different needs (quite probably for which the Messages tab is even more important).