Surus

Agentic Postgres companion — with the right guardrails to safely point LLMs at your prod DB.

Features · Quickstart · Desktop app

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Design

Surus is a Postgres companion client with a built-in agent. The design philosophy is built around 3 core principles.

1. Tight Text-to-SQL Loop. The agent runs a loop: draft a query -> run EXPLAIN -> evaluate the plan, iterate. What lands in your editor has already been fitted and optimized to your data and DB performance.

2. Read-only by design. The agent always stays read-only. It runs on a read-only connection pool — writes fail at the database level. You can opt into write mode from the editor to run your own INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE; the agent never touches that pool.

3. Your data stays private by default. The agent reasons over schema, table statistics, and EXPLAIN plans.

The companion can be run as a local web app or a native MacOS app.

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Features

IDE

• Modern SQL editor with a results grid, CSV export and one-click data visualization
• Saved queries organized in git friendly directory structure
• Query parameters and selection-only execution

Agent

• Tight Text-to-SQL loop that uses query plans and schema stats to optimize queries.
• Anthropic and OpenAI providers with configurable prompts, step/token limits and tool timeouts
• Three chat modes:
  • SQL: Turn a plain text request into a performant SQL query
  • Question: Answer questions about your data in plain text
  • Teach: Build the query, then walk through every clause and why it's written that way
• Schema and stats context is prompt-cached and extension-aware — persistent chat history.
• "Explain with AI" helper for EXPLAIN queries and errors.

ERD

• Auto generated ERD diagram with pan, zoom, and drag-to-reposition tables
• Foreign key highlighting, with hover-to-trace relationships between tables
• Filter to related tables only, or search by name and schema

Logs

• Full query log tagged by who ran it — you, the agent, or the app
• Duration, row count, and errors tracked per query, color-coded by execution speed
• Filter by level or free text, with auto-scroll and jump-to-latest

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Quickstart

Prerequisites

• Python ≥ 3.11 and uv
• Node ≥ 20 and npm
• Docker — only for the optional demo database

make setup        # install backend (uv) + frontend (npm) deps
make demo-db      # optional: spin up a demo Postgres in Docker
make dev          # backend :8765 + frontend :5173 → open http://localhost:5173

On first launch:

1. Add a connection (sidebar +). For the demo DB: host localhost, port 55432, database demo, user/pass postgres.
2. Set your API key in the chat settings to enable the agent.

The demo database (make demo-db) runs timescale/timescaledb-ha:pg16 — Postgres 16 with TimescaleDB and PostGIS enabled, seeded with sample tables, so you can see the extension-aware introspection work out of the box. Re-running the target is idempotent.

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MacOS app

The same UI and backend ship as a native desktop app — a Tauri v2 shell that spawns the backend as a sidecar on 127.0.0.1:8765 and tears it down on exit.

make tauri-dev    # native window against the dev backend (hot reload; needs Rust)
make app          # freeze the backend (PyInstaller) + package Surus.app / .dmg

make app output lands in build/tauri/release/bundle/. The bundle is self-contained — it embeds the frozen Python backend and the built frontend, so it runs without the repo, uv, or a system Python. Builds are currently ad-hoc signed and macOS-only; the web app (make dev) runs anywhere.

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Configuration & data

Everything is stored locally:

• Connections, saved queries, chat history, settings live in a single SQLite file: ~/Library/Application Support/Surus/surus.db on macOS, %LOCALAPPDATA%\Surus on Windows, ~/.local/share/Surus on Linux.
• Secrets — DB passwords and LLM API keys — live in the OS keychain under the service name surus.

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