from Hacker News

The DuckDB Local UI

by xnx on 3/12/25, 12:56 PM with 182 comments

  • by vamega on 3/12/25, 2:40 PM

    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.

  • by fenghorn on 3/12/25, 9:27 PM

    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.

  • by markhalonen on 3/12/25, 2:25 PM

    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.

  • by stared on 3/12/25, 2:48 PM

    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!

  • by jarpineh on 3/12/25, 3:10 PM

    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.

  • by sunshine-o on 3/13/25, 10:56 AM

    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...

  • by RyanHamilton on 3/12/25, 11:28 PM

    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

  • by ryguyrg on 3/12/25, 1:49 PM

    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.

  • by owlstuffing on 3/12/25, 3:00 PM

    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...

  • by liendolucas on 3/12/25, 7:35 PM

    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.

  • by jamesblonde on 3/12/25, 9:38 PM

    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.

  • by davesque on 3/12/25, 8:06 PM

    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.

  • by dkga on 3/12/25, 8:58 PM

    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.

  • by wodenokoto on 3/13/25, 4:54 AM

    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

  • by msvana on 3/13/25, 9:54 AM

    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?

  • by hk1337 on 3/13/25, 3:08 PM

    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.

  • by wanderingmind on 3/12/25, 8:44 PM

    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?

  • by sergius on 3/12/25, 5:42 PM

    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.

  • by klysm on 3/13/25, 12:00 AM

    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.

  • by dminik on 3/12/25, 6:33 PM

    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.

  • by dleeftink on 3/12/25, 2:20 PM

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

  • by russell_h on 3/12/25, 2:29 PM

    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.

  • by Vaslo on 3/12/25, 5:59 PM

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

  • by datadrivenangel on 3/12/25, 2:08 PM

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

  • by la_fayette on 3/12/25, 4:29 PM

    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...

  • by pheeney on 3/12/25, 2:35 PM

    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?

  • by nickreese on 3/12/25, 2:18 PM

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

  • by lars512 on 3/12/25, 3:28 PM

    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.

  • by igtztorrero on 3/12/25, 2:59 PM

    Real hacker new ! I definitely have to try it.

  • by dist-epoch on 3/12/25, 4:27 PM

    it would be awesome if these worked:

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

  • by canadiantim on 3/12/25, 2:53 PM

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

  • by r3tr0 on 3/12/25, 6:53 PM

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

    https://yeet.cx/play

  • by antman on 3/12/25, 1:15 PM

    Nice, hoping it pivottable ui and some simple graph capability

  • by gregw2 on 3/13/25, 12:29 AM

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

  • by adulion on 3/12/25, 2:17 PM

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

  • by alexpadula on 3/12/25, 2:38 PM

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

  • by leetrout on 3/12/25, 2:34 PM

    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 :)

  • by vgt on 3/12/25, 2:15 PM

    Congrats Jeff, Ryan, Antony, Dan, Sheila!

  • by frankfrank13 on 3/12/25, 2:09 PM

    Amazing! Allow publishing please!

  • by DavyJone on 3/12/25, 2:32 PM

    Amazing feature/release!

  • by rustman123 on 3/13/25, 12:34 PM

    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.

  • by cess11 on 3/13/25, 8:00 AM

    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?

  • by Tsarp on 3/12/25, 3:59 PM

    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.

  • by mgaunard on 3/12/25, 8:31 PM

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

  • by harha_ on 3/12/25, 3:02 PM

    Yet another web application.