** SingleStore has a long tradition of sharing its performance optimization efforts with customers, and this blog post continues that tradition by detailing the development of Visual Explain, a tool that helps customers optimize their database schema for maximum performance and discover bottlenecks in the SingleStore engine. The author, who interned at SingleStore last summer, worked on the team developing SingleStore Studio, which includes Visual Explain, and shares insights into the design process, including the use of existing tools like Pev's Postgres EXPLAIN Visualizer as inspiration. The tool was developed to address the complexity of database query execution plans, providing a graphical interface for humans to understand and interact with the output of EXPLAIN or PROFILE commands. The author discusses the challenges of designing an aesthetically pleasing layout algorithm for trees, drawing on research from papers like Reingold and Tilford's Tidier Drawings of Trees and Walker's tree-drawing algorithm. The final implementation uses a strategy similar to Walker's, but with some modifications to accommodate the specific needs of Visual Explain, including the use of heuristics to determine the amount of space between subtrees.