[Community feedback] Hide / restore tables

[DavLagoHern]

Several database users on Reddit described working with large schemas full of technical, temporary, legacy or rarely relevant tables. I am bringing that feedback here to compare workflows and possible tradeoffs in one place.

The problem

Those tables can fill the Object Explorer and make the objects used every day harder to find. Search helps, but maintaining complex regex exclusions is not a friendly default.

A possible direction is an explicit Hide table action plus a straightforward place to view and restore hidden tables. This is currently being explored; it is not marked as planned.

Questions

• Should hidden tables be scoped per connection and schema?
• Should they remain available to SQL autocomplete and QuerIA?
• Would a Show hidden section be useful, or would another recovery UI work better?
• Do you hide a few individual tables or whole groups of technical tables?

Reactions help show how common the problem is. Comments about real schema sizes and workflows are especially useful, without sharing private names or production data.

[DavLagoHern]

quick progress update on this one

i’ve now added the first version of table hiding in the explorer

current behavior:

you can hide a table directly from the context menu
hidden tables are moved into a dedicated Hidden tables section
the section shows a counter so you can see how many are hidden
hidden tables can be restored from there

this is mainly meant to reduce noise in large schemas and make it easier to keep internal / auxiliary tables out of the way while still keeping them accessible

attached are a couple of screenshots of the current implementation

next things i may add depending on feedback:

bulk hide / unhide
search/filter inside hidden tables
hide by pattern/prefix
an option to hide internal/system-like tables more quickly

if you use this kind of feature, i’d love to know what would make it feel complete for your workflow