The DuckDB Local UI

https://duckdb.org/2025/03/12/duckdb-ui.html

by xnx • 1 year ago

926 188 1 year ago

duckdb.org

antman• 1 year ago

Nice, hoping it pivottable ui and some simple graph capability

miked983• 1 year ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43347834

ryguyrg2• 1 year ago

i’m one of the co-founders at MotherDuck. our team is building the UI in collaboration with the team at DuckDB Labs.

this is a first release. we know there are going to be tons of feature requests (including @antman’s request for simple charts). feel free to chime in on this thread and we’ll keep an eye on it!

meanwhile, hope you enjoy this release! we had lots of fun building it.

simonw4• 1 year ago

Is this feature open source?

plipt2• 1 year ago

Maybe you've already seen, but it appears the answer is no, based on xemoka's comment here quoting someone at duckdb

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43344932

ayhanfuat2• 1 year ago

The DuckDB UI is also fully open source: visit the duckdb/duckdb-ui repository if you want to dive in deeper.

Is this really the case? The repo doesn’t seem to have any ui elements?

ryguyrg2• 1 year ago

We updated the video [if that's the reference], because it is not yet open source. Thanks for pointing that out!

9999000009992• 1 year ago

How do you compete with Supabase ? Do you have a built in authentication system? Anything like edge functions.

I've been trying to build a small card game with Supabase and I'm sorta stuck...

jscheel• 1 year ago

Not really the same use-case. DuckDB is more for read-heavy analytical uses.

dowager_dan995• 1 year ago

Supabase IMO sits in the middle of the curve between Firebase and PocketBase, not really the same use case as DuckDB & MotherDuck.

datadrivenangel3• 1 year ago

Y'all at MotherDuck are doing such a great job that I encourage you to not try and muddle the open/closed source divide, at least not this early in the startup lifecycle. Having a local MotherDuck interface is awesome, and doesn't gain much by being 'open source'. Wait to cash out on the community good will when the rewards are higher.

TheFlyingFish• 1 year ago

After playing around for a while, a few things come to mind:

* Being able to specify a db at startup would be pretty cool. I'm teaching a class on SQL this summer and I'm already envisioning workflows where a gatekeeper proxy spins up duckdb-ui containers on-demand for users as they log in/out, and it would be much better if the UI can be pre-seeded with an existing database.

* This is maybe a big ask, but markdown cells in notebooks would be nice. Again thinking of my classroom use-case, it would be nice to distribute course materials (lessons/exercises/etc) as notebooks, but that's a bit of a non-starter without markdown or some equivalent content-centric cell type.

* Not a feature request, I just have to say I'm a big fan of how well it handles displaying massive datasets with on-demand streaming and all. I was imagining that I'd have to introduce the `LIMIT` clause right off the bat so that people don't swamp themselves with 100k's of rows, but if I end up using this then maybe I can hold off on that and introduce it at a more natural time.

Regardless, this is great and I definitely have uses for it outside the class I mentioned, so thanks!

chrisjc2• 1 year ago

    duckdb -ui pre_seeded_db.db

    duckdb -ui -init startup.sql

where startup.sql contains various statements/commands like `.open pre_seeded_db.db`

Alternatively place statements/commands in `~/.duckdbrc` and just run `duckdb -iu`.

probotect0r• 1 year ago

The form to get the free e-book doesn't seem to work.

sigzero2• 1 year ago

I just tried it. Worked for me.

datadrivenangel3• 1 year ago

If the vision here is to build a local-first version of MotherDuck, the future of small data is very very bright.

frankfrank13• 1 year ago

Amazing! Allow publishing please!

vgt• 1 year ago

Congrats Jeff, Ryan, Antony, Dan, Sheila!

adulion• 1 year ago

Wow, big fan of duckdb and this is a great step forward.

nickreese• 1 year ago

This is such a needed addition! Huge duckdb fan, congrats team!

pelagicAustral2• 1 year ago

I'm a bit out of the loop here, but what's the use case for DuckDB?

csjh• 1 year ago

for the average developer I think the killer feature is allowing you to query over whatever data you want (csv, json, parquet, even gsheets) as equals, directly from their file form - can even join across them

alexpadula2• 1 year ago

Small intro, It's a relational database for analytical data primarily. It's an "in-process" database meaning you can import certain files at runtime and query them. That's how it differs primarily from regular relational systems.

gnulinux• 1 year ago

DuckDB is mind blowingly awesome. It is like SQLite, lightweight, embeddable, serverless, in-memory database, but it's optimized to be columnar (analytics optimized). It can work with files that are in filesystem, S3 etc without copying (it just looks at the necessary regions in the file) by just doing `select * from 's3://....something.parquet'`. It support automatic compression and automatic indexing. It can read json lines, parquet, CSV, its own db format, sqlite db, excel, Google Sheets... It has a very convenient SQL dialect with many QoL improvements and extensions (and is PostgreSQL compatible). Best of all: it's incredibly fast. Sometimes it's so fast that I find myself puzzled "how can it possibly analyze 10M rows in 0.1 seconds?" and I find it difficult to replicate the performance in pure Rust. It is an extremely useful tool. In the last year, it has become one of my use-everyday tools because the scope of problems you can just throw DuckDB at is gigantic. If you have a whole bunch of structured data that you want to learn something about, chances are DuckDB is the ideal tool.

PS: Not associated with DuckDB team at all, I just love DuckDB so much that I shill for them when I see them in HN.

simonw4• 1 year ago

On way to think about it is SQLite for columnar / analytical data.

It works great against local files, but my favorite DuckDB feature is that it can run queries against remote Parquet files, fetching just the ranges of bytes it needs to answer the query using HTTP range queries.

This means you can run eg a count(*) against a 15GB parquet file from your laptop and only fetch a few hundred KBs of data (if that).

dleeftink3• 1 year ago

Really cool. Could you elaborate a but more on what the 'notebook' form factor entails? Should we expect the same as other notebook environments?

ssgirl113• 1 year ago

Our notebook form factor is unique compared to other notebook environments - we don't serialize the results.

We also have some added bonuses for query profiling and data exploration like the Column Explorer.

The easiest way to give it a whirl is to type 'duckdb -ui' in the CLI.

Let us know if you have any other questions

dleeftink3• 1 year ago

Just wondering about reactivity, imports, exports, plain file storage? I don't expect it to be there on a first release, but that's where my mind goes if I see a reference to the notebook form factor.

swyx• 1 year ago

is it a jupyter or marimo style notebook or some third thing?

markhalonen2• 1 year ago

I suggest https://perspective.finos.org/ for data viz to be built in. We use DuckDB paired with Perspective for client-side BI use case, and it's been great.

dleeftink3• 1 year ago

Why Perspective? If going for a D3 wrapper, Plot would offer more flexibility.

summer_avery• 1 year ago

We've built a nice integration for Plot + DuckDB, found here: https://www.duckplot.com/!

mritchie7125• 1 year ago

we're using Perspective in crabwalk[0] (it's like dbt specifically built for duckdb and written in rust) and it's amazing paired with duckdb. Near instant loads for hundreds of thousands of rows and you can keep everything in arrow.

0 - https://github.com/definite-app/crabwalk

0cf8612b2e1e2• 1 year ago

Where are you using/advocating crabwalk?

It does look interesting, but for the local ETL use case, I am missing the pitch on just having my own collection of SQL scripts. Presumably the all-local case needs less complexity. Unless the idea is that this will eventually support more connectors/backends and work as a full dbt replacement?

texodus2• 1 year ago

Glad you dig it! Check out our pro version to - it also support DuckDB, Python/Pyodide and more! https://prospective.co

pepperonipboy• 1 year ago

Wow that's really cool! Part of my PhD thesis was about writing stable treemapping algorithms for temporal data. The idea being that you want your treemap cells not to fly around like what I'm seeing in your demo, but to remain more or less in the same position without sacrificing too much on the cells aspect ratios. We've come up with a pretty effective and fast method to do that, check out the paper and a demo down below. Maybe we could even do a collaboration to get this implemented in perspective.

https://github.com/EduardoVernier/eduardovernier.github.io/b...

https://youtu.be/Bf-MRxhNMdI?list=PLy5Y4CMtJ7mKaUBrSZ3YgwrFY... (see the GIT method)

ciupicri2• 1 year ago

The online demo looks great and promising, too bad it's unusable for me. I've tried installing it with conda from conda-forge and no luck. I've tried installing it with pip, the same. I've also cloned the repository from github, tried to build it and failed, but I don't remember the details.

Why is some software so difficult to install beats me.

timkpaine• 1 year ago

Have you ever reported an issue? I use perspective heavily on a variety of platforms both conda and pypi without any problems.

tobilg6• 1 year ago

Have a look at https://sql-workbench.com eventually, as it's using DuckDB WASM & Perspective to render the query results. Let me know what you think!

markhalonen2• 1 year ago

This is actually how I discovered Perspective!

russell_h• 1 year ago

This looks great!

At risk of harping on a tired topic, have you thought about embedding an AI query generator? For ad-hoc queries like I mostly use DuckDB for I’ve found it’s almost always fastest for me to paste the schema to ChatGPT, tell it what I’ll looking for, then paste the response back into the DuckD CLI, but the whole process isn’t very ergonomic.

I think I’m sort of after duckbook.ai, but with access to a local duckdb.

ssgirl113• 1 year ago

Thanks for sharing. We haven't cracked the code on doing this locally, but we are working on similar features and functionality in MotherDuck, like the prompt () and embedding () functions. More to come; we're definitely thinking about it!

tobilg6• 1 year ago

You can potentially use Ollama running a model locally, e.g. https://ollama.com/library/duckdb-nsql

oulipo3• 1 year ago

The UI of duckbook.ai is great! I wish someone would open-source something similar!

DavyJone• 1 year ago

Amazing feature/release!

leetrout• 1 year ago

Love to see this! This is something rethinkdb (RIP) got right from the start IMO and I like to see tooling like this available from the manufacturer :)

pheeney4• 1 year ago

What is the best method for using the UI with a remote server that only has SSH access? The database is too large to rsync locally and seems risky to start opening ports?

hfmuehleisen• 1 year ago

SSH port forwarding?

pheeney4• 1 year ago

It looks like the port is configurable, so that should make it easier to avoid conflicts but I wonder how the performance would be impacted.

drakythe2• 1 year ago

Support for the UI is implemented in a DuckDB extension. The extension embeds a localhost HTTP server, which serves the UI browser application, and also exposes an API for communication with DuckDB. In this way, the UI leverages the native DuckDB instance from which it was started, enabling full access to your local memory, compute, and file system.

Given the above I'm not sure it supports SSH functionality? Since it exposes an API though there is probably a way to access it, but the easiest solution is probably the one you don't want, which is to open the expected port and just hit it up in a browser. You could open it only to your (office/VPN) IP address, that way at least you're only exposing the port to yourself.

pheeney4• 1 year ago

My ip is dynamic so it seems I would need to wrap it in a script that would handle opening and closing. I didn’t see any authentication built into the UI. Seems like a great local tool but harder to get right in production.

alexpadula2• 1 year ago

It's a start to something great. Keep it up!

vamega• 1 year ago

This looks pretty great. The UI looked fantastic, and the post mentioned that it was open source. However what's open source appears to be the DuckDB extension, which forwards the requests to a remote URL. I've not been able to find the code for the actual UI.

Is the actual UI open source, or is that something MotherDuck is allowing to be used by this while remaining proprietary? Right now it doesn't appear like this would work without an internet connection.

thenaturalist4• 1 year ago

Concur, this is rather confusing wording and the GUI components are closed source as far as I can see.

jarpineh6• 1 year ago

The docs say that the extension's server is configured here: https://duckdb.org/docs/stable/extensions/ui#remote-url

But yeah, I can't find docs nor source for the UI. And the extension docs refer to MotherDuck's own UI: https://motherduck.com/docs/getting-started/motherduck-quick...

So, a bit confusing way this is set up.

radicality• 1 year ago

It’s quite funny the docs also say this about the configurable url:

Be sure you trust any URL you configure, as the application can access the data you load into DuckDB.

That’s certainly not what I would expect if someone gave me a “local UI” for some database. I’ve only just once toyed with duckdb, was planning to look more at it - looks like will need to have my guard and see what actually is “local” and doesn’t ship my data to a remote url.

xemoka2• 1 year ago

Yeah, this is really concerning. The handwaving around "keeping the ui up to date" by hosting it on ui.duckdb.org instead of embedding it doesn't taste great to me.

At least it's hosted on duckdb.org and not mother duck, but I really would expect to see that source somewhere. Disappointing unless I've missed it.

Breadcrumbs in the extension src: https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-ui/blob/963e0e4d4c6f84b2536...

xemoka2• 1 year ago

Yes. So confirmation from Jeff Raymakers, a software engineer at MotherDuck, the UI is not open source.

Jeff Raymakers — Today at 9:25 AM
The language in the blog post is misleading, and we're going to correct it.
The UI extension is open source, but the UI itself is not.

memset• 1 year ago

The actual UI is not open source.

(Someone could write an actually open source UI extension for duckdb, but that would require a lot of investment that so far only motherduck has been able to provide.)

dowager_dan995• 1 year ago

I've looked at quite a few options, and this one (the product of a single person) is a great base, and MIT licensed: https://github.com/caioricciuti/duck-ui

If you want to support a real OS UI take a look.

frankc• 1 year ago

I find the SqlLab in apache superset to be very good, and I have duckdb as a data source (anything that supports SqlAlchemy works). It works very well. To be honest, when I first saw the screenshot, I thought it was SqlLab. I haven't actually tried the duckdb ui, though.

plipt2• 1 year ago

How is this promoted as a "local UI" if it gets the UI from a remote URL?

Maybe the closed source UI is downloaded upon first execution for installation and then cached locally?

Or is this a web app that loads from the remote URL each time?

daveguy• 1 year ago

It's a web interface, but it is served from the local machine. The default is http://localhost:4213/

See the note just above this link on data locations and the optional and explicit opt-in to motherduck:

https://duckdb.org/2025/03/12/duckdb-ui.html#features

szarnyasg2• 1 year ago

I'm a co-author of the blog post. I agree that the wording was confusing – apologies for the confusion. I added a note at the end:

The repository does not contain the source code for the frontend, which is currently not available as open-source. Releasing it as open-source is under consideration.

rastignack2• 1 year ago

Some people work in serious work environments, on heavily regulated data. Thanks for another software landmine !

Make it opt-in, or not installed by default please, it’s so hazardous.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

Honestly I hope they keep some things proprietary. Just making everything FOSS is not a sustainable business model, and I would quite like DuckDB to continue to exist.

I have similar concerns for Astral. Frankly they're single-handedly unshitifying Python, and it would be a tragedy if they run out of money and we're back to dealing with Pip.

rastignack2• 1 year ago

And so the malware-izarion of duckdb begins. Investors need revenue I guess.

bigfatkitten• 1 year ago

So just to clarify, it's not really a local UI, ie I can't use it on an airgapped machine?

stared3• 1 year ago

I really like the columns explorer, https://motherduck.com/blog/introducing-column-explorer/.

Just a few days ago I have been looking for existing column explorers that look like from Kaggle Dataset, but I was not able to find anything. And this one by DuckDB is better!

thenaturalist4• 1 year ago

I have seen a ton of DB GUI clients/ cloud based data tools for analytics purposes and the fact that MotherDuck's column explorer/ column data distribution is hands down the best I know is puzzling me.

It seems nobody else besides them cares.

Seeing data distribution, unique values, min/ max/ percentiles is so easy and powerful.

Really commend whoever came up with that.

It's a bit of a shame this metadata cannot be queried itself, would be immensely useful for automatic data profiling/ QA at scale.

stared3• 1 year ago

Do you know if there is any open source TypeScript component that can be used in a project?

mritchie7125• 1 year ago

it's partly bc this would be extremely slow and expensive with many other databases (e.g. it'd be really slow on postgres, very expensive on snowflake).

aszen• 1 year ago

A similar open source column explorer is :

https://github.com/manzt/quak

See it's demo:

https://manzt.github.io/quak/?source=https://pub-2fc10ef6724...

oulipo3• 1 year ago

Seems heavily inspired by the column summary of ObservableHQ, but that's nice!

hamilton3• 1 year ago

(I designed and built the Column Explorer feature)

Observable's column summary feature is very nice! But I do think there's a very common lineage around these kinds of diagnostics which motivated both Observables and ours. See Jeff Heer's profiler paper[1] for more.

I'm very passionate about this area because I think "first mile problems" are underserved by most tools, but they take the longest to work out.

We had to do some gnarly things[2] to make this feature work well; and there's a lot of room to make it scale nicely and cover all DuckDB data types.

[1] http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/profiler [2] https://motherduck.com/blog/introducing-column-explorer/

canadiantim• 1 year ago

Is it possible to use DuckDB on a per-user basis? Does Motherduck enable this?

ssgirl113• 1 year ago

DuckDB is single player and single node.

MotherDuck lets you run a fleet of DuckDB instances as a managed cloud service.

igtztorrero• 1 year ago

Real hacker new ! I definitely have to try it.

owlstuffing• 1 year ago

I’ve been using IntelliJ’s JDBC-based UI, this will add a lot more capability. I’m using the manifold-sql[1] project with duckdb for analytics, amazing.

1. https://github.com/manifold-systems/manifold/blob/master/doc...

harha_• 1 year ago

Yet another web application.

culi• 1 year ago

The best kind of cross-platform application

dowager_dan995• 1 year ago

with the WASM work in DuckDB this is actually a great use-case. For so many workflows you can do everything in a local browser session.

omarmihilmy• 1 year ago

yep. personally, prefer native apps for this use case, I wrapped duckdb into a nice native mac app: https://macdatapro.com

hermitcrab• 1 year ago

Nice demo video.

jarpineh6• 1 year ago

The UI looks nice and is by itself a welcome addition.

I am somewhat at odds with it being a default extension build into DuckDB release. This still is a feature/product coming from another company than the makers of DuckDB [1], though they did announce a partnership with makers of this UI [2]. Whilst DuckDB has so far thrived without VC money, MotherDuck has (at least) 100M in VC [3].

I guess I'm wondering where the lines are between free and open source work compared to commercial work here. My assumption has been that the line is what DuckDB ships and what others in the community do. This release seems to change that.

Yes, I do like and use nice, free things. And I understand that things have to be paid for by someone. That someone even sometimes is me. I guess I'd like clarification on the future of DuckDB as its popularity and reach is growing.

[1] https://duckdblabs.com

[2] https://duckdblabs.com/news/2022/11/15/motherduck-partnershi...

[3] https://motherduck.com/blog/motherduck-open-for-all-with-ser...

edit: I don't want to leave this negative sounding post here without addendum. I'm just concerned of future monetization strategies and roadmap of DuckDB. DuckDB is a good and useful, versatile tool. I mainly use it from Python through Jupyter, in the browser and native. I haven't felt the need for commercial services (plus purchasing them from my professional setting is too convoluted). This UI whilst undoubtedly useful seems to be leaning towards commercial side. I merely wanted some clarity on what it might entail. I do hope DuckDB and its community even more greater, better things, with requisite compensation for those who work to ensure this.

simonw4• 1 year ago

Reminiscent of what Deno are doing with their Deno K/V feature, which works in the open source project using SQLite but gets a big upgrade if you use it with Deno Deploy: https://til.simonwillison.net/deno/deno-kv

I'm OK with this. Commercial open source projects need a business model. I get why this can be controversial, but the ecosystem needs to find ways to fund future development and I'm willing to compromise on purity if it means people are getting paid for their work.

(Actually it looks like the UI feature may depend on loading closed source assets across the Internet? If so that changes my comfort level a lot, I'm not keen on that compromise.)

simlevesque• 1 year ago

https://github.com/denoland/denokv

You can self host Deno KV since over a year.

dowager_dan995• 1 year ago

I don't see this as the same thing. Deno is an OS product within a commercial enterprise. DuckDB is an OS project/org; MotherDuck is a for-profit company. They have tight integration and partnerships but were largely independent. This seems to be blurring that line. There is a huge ecosystem around SQLite without this confusion.

jarpineh6• 1 year ago

I have thought that the commercial nature of the (heh) mother company here, DuckDB labs, is support contracts and the like. Whilst MotherDuck is just another VC funded company in the DuckDB ecosystem. This new extension being added the list of default extensions blurs the line. That it seemingly is a proxy to closed source product from another company makes things even murkier. I can see a point for a for-pay external extension, but this one feels more like an AD for other company's services.

blackoil• 1 year ago

I think primary concern is will DucDb pull something like RedisLabs. Wherein they are open source till it gets enough traction and after that pull the rug.

mytherin2• 1 year ago

One of the DuckDB maintainers here. To clarify - the UI is not built into the DuckDB release. It is an extension that is downloaded and installed like any other extension. This extension happens to be developed by MotherDuck. We collaborated with them to streamline the experience - but fundamentally the extension is not distributed as part of DuckDB and works similarly to other extensions.

To be specific, the work we did was:

* Add the -ui command to the shell. This executes a SQL query (CALL start_ui()). The query that gets executed can be customized by the user through the .ui_command option - e.g. by setting .ui_command my_ui_function().

* The ui extension is automatically installed and loaded when the start_ui function is executed - similar to other trusted extensions we distribute. The automatic install and load can be disabled through configuration (SET autoinstall_known_extensions=false, SET autoload_known_extensions=false) and is also disabled when SET enable_external_access=false.

jarpineh6• 1 year ago

The nature of UI as an extension is somewhat hard to understand, since its installation method differs from other extensions. Even core ones. Some extensions autoload, some require INSTALL query, and this one has its own special builtin query. It at least feels more ingrained than other extensions by its user experience.

Then there's the (to me) entirely new feature of an extension providing a HTTP proxy for external web service. This part could have been more prominently explained.

Edit: the OP states that "built-in local UI for DuckDB" and "full-featured local web user interface is available out-of-the-box". These statements make me think this feature comes with the release binary, not that it's an extension.

To clarify my point: for me it's not the possible confusion of what this plugin does or how, but what this collaboration means for the future of DuckDB's no-cost and commercial usage.

capkutay• 1 year ago

I think this is a bit of a non issue. The UI is just that, a UI. Take it or leave it. If it makes your life easier, great. If not, nothing changes about how you use DuckDB.

There is always going to be some overlap between open source contributions and commercial interests but unless a real problem emerges like core features getting locked behind paywalls there is no real cause for concern. If that happens then sure let’s talk about it and raise the issue in a public forum. But for now it is just a nice convenience feature that some people (like me) will find useful.

jarpineh6• 1 year ago

That's one way of looking at it. To me this UI seems like both a useful tool and an advertisement.

There's another way this could have gone. DuckDB Labs might have published the extension as providing official HTTP API for all to use. Then simultaneously MotherDuck would announce support for it in their UI. Now with access to any and all databases whether in-browser, anywhere through official HTTP API or in their managed cloud service.

I for one would like HTTP API for some things that now necessitates doing my own in Python. I don't see yet much need for the UI. I'm not looking for public, multiuser service. Just something that I can use locally which doesn't have to be inside a process (such as Python or web browser). There's such API in the extension now, but it's without docs and in C++ [1]. There's also the option of using 3rd party community extension that also does HTTP API [2]. Then there's one that supports remote access with Arrow Flight, but gRPC only it seems [3]. But official, stable version would be nice.

[1] https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-ui/blob/main/src/http_serve...

[2] https://duckdb.org/community_extensions/extensions/httpserve...

[3] https://github.com/Query-farm/duckdb-airport-extension

lars512• 1 year ago

This looks nice! It could be a replacement for me for duckdb-parquet, a plugin for Datasette that lets you run it on top of DuckDB instead of SQLite.

Tsarp• 1 year ago

Just came here to say, the demo video was awesome!

Refreshing to neither see a loom recording or a high budget video set in a Japandi architecture style office designed to go viral.

dist-epoch• 1 year ago

it would be awesome if these worked:

    duckdb -ui data.parquet
    duckdb -ui data.sqlite

chrisjc2• 1 year ago

duckdb -cmd 'CREATE TABLE my_data AS FROM READ_PARQUET($$data.parquet$$)' -ui

`duckdb -ui sqlitedb.db` should work bc duckdb can read sqlite files. If it doesn't autoload extension, you can INSTALL/LOAD in to your ~/.duckdbrc

la_fayette• 1 year ago

The UI looks quite nice. I am heavily using DBeaver with various different analytical DBs. Right now I am not sure though what the built-in UI offers, which is not in DBeaver...

sigzero2• 1 year ago

DBeaver is great and you're probably right. If I was only doing DuckDB work it would be helpful but that is rarely the case for me and DBeaver works better for my use cases.

sergius• 1 year ago

Would it be possible to install duckdb extensions in python using packages instead of dialing back home to the extension service? Lots of companies block direct connections to that service but allow packages via JFrog's Artifactory.

Vaslo• 1 year ago

Duckdb and polars have changed my Python development completely. Great packages that can work together, excited to see this.

riku_iki2• 1 year ago

wondering why just polars is not enough?

ies7• 1 year ago

Some of us are better as sql guy than pandas/polars guys syntax.

dminik• 1 year ago

I don't have anything to say in regards to DuckDB or this UI. But, I do find it funny that their homepage animation causes google to index the description as:

DuckDB is a fast ana| database system.

r3tr0• 1 year ago

we use a canvas windowed approach for duck db but we specialize in system perf data.

https://yeet.cx/play

liendolucas2• 1 year ago

Anecdote. Last year I had to work with a heavy analytics process. The whole thing was 4 or 5 large steps and was written with PySpark. It was really slow and memory on my system run quite low (on a 8Gb system with a generous swap), sometimes even stopping the whole processing of the pipeline. For one heavy step we tried out DuckDB and I was blown away how performant against PySpark was. It was not only fast as hell but its memory footprint extremely low as well, almost as if something was wrong and had to recheck several times that it was correct, and yes it did what it was supposed to do. Now this is a place where I do actually care about how fast and performant a thing can be and not the nanoseconds that each JS frontend framework of the day claims to win. KUDOS to the DuckDB team.

Marazan2• 1 year ago

Spark is never going to be the right choice when running on a single system.

Spark is for when you have a hundreds of machines worth of processing to do

moooo99• 1 year ago

Spark is for when you have a hundreds of machines worth of processing to do

Absolutely agree. However, most uses of Spark I've seen in my career are people thinking they have hundreds of machines worth of processing to do.

liendolucas2• 1 year ago

We haven't developed the PySpark pipeline. It was given to us to be improved, which we did a whole rewrite to leave it more clean and understandable. We also tried a persistence switch to test if it was a better choice just in case a step failed we could resume from a prevoius one. I also had zero hands-on on PySpark and DuckDB. But yes, I was amazed at how far it was falling behind DuckDB. I wasn't expecting such a difference. Ah also this pipeline did indeed run on the cloud, but it was not posible to test it there, so the only choice was to run it locally.

aradox66• 1 year ago

Motherduck has an excellent article about this: https://motherduck.com/blog/the-simple-joys-of-scaling-up/

mritchie7125• 1 year ago

simple example along these lines running on AWS (specifically paired with Iceberg): https://www.definite.app/blog/cloud-iceberg-duckdb-aws

davesque• 1 year ago

Weirdly, as cool as this looks, it's a bit concerning to me. It feels like this is marking a milestone in the history of a great open source project where they are doing one or many of the following:

1) Biting off more than they can chew,

2) Putting significant effort into something that's outside of their core value proposition,

3) Leaning more in the direction of supporting things with a for profit company that gradually cannibalizes the open source side.

Maybe I'm being too cynical. I hope I'm wrong.

mritchie7125• 1 year ago

duckdb labs didn't make the UI, motherduck did. The extension just launches the web UI.

you might have a point on #3, but they need to pay the bills somehow.

remram• 1 year ago

The fact that this is what they need to do to pay the bills doesn't decrease my concern, it increases it.

tobilg6• 1 year ago

But they got a custom CLI argument in the OSS product for it. And hosting/proxying it under the OSS domain ui.duckdb.org

mgaunard• 1 year ago

how come DuckDB manages to keep delivering such great new features?

wanderingmind• 1 year ago

I see many folks trying to build UI for multiple databases, when excellent open source solutions like DBeaver exist. Is there a reason to use this UI compared to DBeaver, through which I can interact almost all major databases?

inglor• 1 year ago

Yes that's what I wanted to know, in particular I use DuckDB with DBeaver all the time to explore/play with parquets and other stuff - why would I prefer their new UI?

dkga• 1 year ago

Other commented on the frontend not being open source at the moment (which I hope they will eventually come around and OS it). But I just wanted to say how great this feels. In particular, being able to launch from within the CLI is a godsend because sometimes you start in the CLI and then realise you are better served with a GUI due to data complexity, etc.

fenghorn• 1 year ago

The UI aesthetics look similar to the excellent Rill, also powered by DuckDB: https://www.rilldata.com/

Rill has better built in visualizations and pivot tables and overall a polished product with open-source code in Go/Svelte. But the DuckDB UI has very nice Jupyter notebook-style "cells" for editing SQL queries.

ayhanfuat2• 1 year ago

Hamilton Ulmer was involved in both. Back when Twitter was a thing it was really cool to follow his process.

articsputnik• 1 year ago

You still can on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/hamilton.bsky.social/post/3lk6yxzan...

miked983• 1 year ago

Rill founder here, I have no comment on the UI similarity :) but I would emphasize our vision is building DuckDB-powered metrics layers and exploratory dashboards -- which we presented at DuckCon #6 last month, PDF below [1] -- and less on notebook style UIs like Hex and Jupyter.

Rill is fully open-source under the Apache license. [2]

[1] https://blobs.duckdb.org/events/duckcon6/mike-driscoll-rill-...

[2] https://github.com/rilldata/rill

westurner3• 1 year ago

WhatTheDuck does SQL with duckdb-wasm

Pygwalker does open-source descriptive statistics and charts from pandas dataframes: https://github.com/Kanaries/pygwalker

ydata-profiling does open-source Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) with Pandas and Spark DataFrames and integrates with various apps: https://github.com/ydataai/ydata-profiling #integrations, #use-cases

archon810• 1 year ago

I love HN. Random comments about some service out there and replies are like "I am the founder" or "I wrote that".

wodenokoto3• 1 year ago

Is there a video of your talk?

jamesblonde• 1 year ago

I love DuckDB Labs. They get to work on their cool engine. Get paid by Databricks to build Delta Support. Get paid by MotherDuck to build a UI. Always making the core open-source offering better, but getting massively VC funded companies to pay for it.

tobilg6• 1 year ago

Actually, the UI was built by MotherDuck…

RyanHamilton2• 1 year ago

Congratulations on the launch. Looks very cool. If anyone is looking for a local non Web based editor please check out qstudio: https://www.timestored.com/qstudio/help/duckdb-sql-editor

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

I use studio for kdb, didn't know it can be used with duckdb too.

klysm2• 1 year ago

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth, because motherduck is going to try and use this to squeeze more money out of duckdb. It’s a slippery slope from here on out.

ayuhito• 1 year ago

To me, Motherduck have so far been excellent stewards for DuckDB. I want them to find a sustainable business model.

I doubt they’ll ever enshittify DuckDB core. It’s clear they’re only aiming for better integration with their paid service via peripherals like UI to improve the experience, but you also don’t need to use it?

It’s all extensions that you can develop the end.

gregw2• 1 year ago

is there any ability for us to log centrally the SQL queries executed from multiple laptops against our s3 iceberg store?

wodenokoto3• 1 year ago

The notebook style of exploring data in a database is absolutely great, but I have yet to find a great implementation of it.

Azure Data Studio can connect to a variety of databases and has completions, but tend to forget if you've set a cell to output a plot. It also doesn't have good functionality for carrying over results from one cell to the next.

Jupyter notebooks don't have any kind of autocompletion against a database (at least to my knowledge), but you do get a lot of control of how you want to store things between cells and display things.

This DuckDB UI looks great, and while DuckDB can read a lot of files, I'm not sure if it has enough connectors to be a general database exploration notebook

RyanHamilton2• 1 year ago

I also didn't like the existing notebook implementations. I wanted it to run locally, be based on markdown, specialized for just SQL and be easy to store in git. So I wrote one myself: https://www.timestored.com/sqlnotebook/ It ships as part of qstudio and can connect to 30+ databases. If you have any feedback please leave it on github, I only released it a few months ago.

cess11• 1 year ago

The article says nothing about licensing. Can I put this in front of paying customers without bothering with signing contracts and forwarding cash to someone else?

msvana• 1 year ago

Hopefully you'll forgive my ignorance, but this is the first time I hear about DuckDB. What space does it occupy in the DBMS landscape? What are its use cases? How does it compare to other DBMS solutions?

szarnyasg2• 1 year ago

Hi, DuckDB devrel here. DuckDB is an analytical SQL database in the form factor of SQLite (i.e., in-process). This quadrant summarizes its space in the landscape:

https://blobs.duckdb.org/slides/goto-amsterdam-2024-duckdb-g...

It works as a replacement / complementary component to dataframe libraries due to it's speed and (vertical) scalability. It's lightweight and dependency-free, so it also works as part of data processing pipelines.

enema_bag_jones2• 1 year ago

Hello, I'd love to use this but I work with highly confidential data. How can we be sure our data isn't leaking with this new UI? What assurances are there on this, and can you comment on the scope of the MotherDuck server interactions?

sunshine-o2• 1 year ago

I do not know much about DuckDB but it sure looks awesome.

Something I haven't found yet is a small swiss army knife for time series type of data: system and network monitoring, sensors and market data.

I usually put everything in Prometheus but it is awkward.

I would really love to find something I can query intuitively with SQL, have very basic plotting capability, read/parse some log files, can be queried without having to deal with REST/JSON, and support adding data with pushes.

I am wondering if this is not within DuckDB broad capabilities...

raoulj• 1 year ago

Duckdb cannot plot on its own. You would need to bring in matplotlib or some alternative.

pants2• 1 year ago

You might give QuestDB a try, it supports all the above except native graphing, though it does support Grafana and have a nice query UI. It's lightweight and blazing fast in my experience.

sunshine-o2• 1 year ago

Thanks, it looks awesome !

tobilg6• 1 year ago

Have a look at https://sql-workbench.com eventually. It runs DuckDB WASM in the browser, and with Perspective, which is used for data visualization, you can also visualize timeseries.

You can either drag & drop data, or use remote data sources via https

rustman123• 1 year ago

Piggybacking on comments regarding the external hosting:

It's just a matter of time until there will be a paywall in front of this. Hook people on something, then demand money.

hk1337• 1 year ago

This is really cool. I use Datagrip almost religiously and ended up adding it as a source there and found it really nice to use.

*EDIT*

One useful thing I thought of with this. If you do a lot of development work on iPad Pro and/or in devcontainers, this could be useful as a UI. I have a bookmarks repository that is just a couple of python scripts and collection of json files. This would be useful to spin up a codespace on GitHub and query the files.

thekevinwang• 1 year ago

This looks very similar to https://hex.tech/. Is there a UI library that is used by the two?

enema_bag_jones2• 1 year ago

With the UI being loaded from the web, how do we know our sensitive data is not being leaked? looks great, but there's a concern for those of us with confidential data if this now not totally local.

loa_observer2• 1 year ago

For further visual EDA, pygwalker provides advanced features for interactive data visualization, which is also built based on duckdb.

src: https://kanaries.net/pygwalker

github: https://github.com/Kanaries/pygwalker

The DuckDB Local UI

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