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Show HN: CSVFiddle – Query CSV files with DuckDB in the browser

by shbhrsaha on 7/1/22, 1:27 PM with 13 comments

  • by shbhrsaha on 7/1/22, 2:59 PM

    Hey HN,

    I made CSVFiddle because I wanted a quick way to query CSV files with SQL and share the results with other people.

    The app runs 100% in-browser, so the data you import and the queries you write are never sent to a web server. When you share the URL to a workspace, all of its queries and references to CSV files are just encoded in the URL fragment.

    In-browser querying is made possible by DuckDB-Wasm, which has been an awesome project to work with:

    https://duckdb.org/2021/10/29/duckdb-wasm.html

    There are definitely limitations with CSVFiddle (e.g. sometimes the auto-parsing feature doesn't accurately interpret the imported files), but so far it's been useful for a range of data tasks.

    Some demo workspaces you can check out:

    University Students by State https://tinyurl.com/6k35anth

    Uber Pickups in NYC https://tinyurl.com/5n8av39h

  • by danso on 7/1/22, 5:06 PM

    By no means am I crapping on what you've created — it looks great, and I've always wanted to try DuckDB and now you've made a frictionless entrypoint — just wanted to point out in general that querying CSV with SQL is more accessible than some people might have assumed. e.g. here's a recent TIL blogpost from Simon Willison about him discovering how to do sqlite queries against CSV from the command line: https://til.simonwillison.net/sqlite/one-line-csv-operations

    One suggestion I would make: the Uber trips data is interesting, but might be too big for this demo? I was getting a few loading errors when trying it (didn't investigate where in the process the bottleneck was though)

  • by throwamon on 7/1/22, 9:44 PM

    Not to discourage you or anything, but Observable seems to cover this without too much hassle:

    https://observablehq.com/@cmudig/introducing-sql-with-duckdb

  • by ijidak on 7/1/22, 5:44 PM

    This is great.

    Will definitely be using this.

    I wouldn't worry too much about people focused on running from the command line.

    I love the command line. But not as a query interface for quick investigation of CSV data.

    I've been wanting something like this for a long time!

    Excited to give it a try.

  • by kristianp on 7/1/22, 10:09 PM

    I guess if it uses duckdb it can query parquet (and duckdb) files too?

  • by swuecho on 7/2/22, 1:22 AM

    very useful tools!